Textpattern Support Forum

candyman wrote:

I’d like to have custom fields related to the forms, eg:

Not quite related to forms as such, but if you pack your book-related fields into one custom field and your film-related fields into a second custom field, and put your film review articles in a different TXP section to your book review articles, you could use sed_section_fields to display the relevant custom field in the back-end.

If you pack your custom fields like this:

meta(title='Our story';author='Him';editor='Me';pages='42')

on the public side you could have some conditional logic in the form that displays your articles like:

<txp:if_section name="book_reviews">
 Author: <txp:sed_pcf custom="books" section="meta" variable="author" />
 ...
<txp:else />
 Director: <txp:sed_pcf custom="books" section="meta" variable="director" />
 ...
</txp:if_section>

There are probably better ways of doing it, but does that help at all?

candyman

Your approach sounds great and very logical.

sed_pcf is used for packing more data into a custom field than just one item. Normally one custom field = one “thing”, like Director, No of Pages, etc. This plugin’s only really of use if you use custom fields a lot and you don’t use any other plugin to extend the built-in limit of 10. It sounds that if you are using glz_custom_fields to obtain more than 10 (I didn’t know it did that as well!) then sed_pcf is not necessary.

But if you do decide to pack more than one “type” of information into a single custom field, this is how you do it:

1. Decide on a name for your custom field; something that is generic enough to encapsulate all the data you want to put in it. So, taking the “film review” example, instead of having separate custom fields for No of Pages, No of Minutes, No of Tracks, you could pack them into a single custom field called “Duration” or “Quantity” or something like that (I’ll choose “Quantity” for this example)
2. In each Film Review article, populate the custom field called “Quantity” with data like this: pages(num='92')|mins(num='126')|tracks(num='8'). There are a variety of ways of specifying the data inside a custom field, detailed in the sed_pcf help. So an alternative might be: info(pages='92';mins='126';tracks='8'). Parts of a custom field separated by ‘|’ characters are called “sections” (a trifle confusing :-) and anything to the left of an ‘=’ is called a “variable”
3. In your forms, you “extract” information from within a given custom field. If you use the 1st syntax from step 2 you would pull out the running time of the film like this: <txp:sed_pcf custom="quantity" section="mins" variable="num" />. That would display 126. If you chose the 2nd format you would use: <txp:sed_pcf custom="quantity" section="info" variable="mins" />

So you see it is rather flexible and is limited only by how much information you want to “pack” into each custom field. There is a third “simple” syntax which is just a comma-separated list: 92,126,8. I’ve not used that one yet so I’m not sure how easy it is to get at the data; I suspect it is solely for iterating over the contents of the custom field using sed_pcf_for_each but I’m not sure. And there are also “if” tags in the plugin so you can take action depending if a custom field contains a certain variable or section, which may reduce the number of forms a little.

Like I say, if you’re using glz_custom_fields then you probably don’t need sed_pcf.

Is that any clearer?

Last edited by Bloke (2008-03-02 10:45:00)

I do not understand what I am doing wrong. I have comma separated values in my custom1 field (named YouTubeV=) and I keep getting the following error: Returning early – nothing to do in CF[YouTubeV=].

I have a page with the following:
<txp:article form=“art” />

The Art form is:
<txp:if_article_list>
<h3><txp:permlink><txp:title /></txp:permlink></h3>
<txp:else />
<h3><txp:title /></h3>
<div id=“thumbs”>
<txp:hak_article_thumb linktype=“page” link=“1” linktitle=“txp:alt” />
<txp:sed_pcf_for_each_value name=“YouTubeV=” debug=“1” />
</div>
<div id=“image_box”>
<txp:hak_article_image form=“art_image” urloverride=“1” limit=“1” linktitle=“view image” />
</div>
</txp:if_article_list>

I have two articles… both of have values in the YouTubeV= custom field.

Article 1 has: UcKqyn-gUbY,PzyAP4zLb6w,90mj79GqWhc,B5MkpzMAOZM,V-TGxJI4JwA
Ariticle 2 has: red,green,blue,orange,purple,yellow

I am using TXP 4.0.6
I read Bloke’s post that mentioned the sed_plugin_library, so I installed it as well. Still doesn’t return anything.

Thanks to anyone who can help!

Last edited by photonomad (2008-08-02 22:04:07)

Net-Carver — Your reply helped me figure it out. Actually, the capital letters in “YouTubeV=” (not the “=”) were the problem. I made the custom field name lowercase “youtubev=” and it works perfectly now.

This is a very helpful plugin. Thanks for all of your work!