Textpattern CMS

#1 2007-04-13 21:12:56

saccade

Plugin Author

From: Neubeuern, Germany

Registered: 2004-11-05

Posts: 521

Provide form with URL-call OR (messy) URL-syntax

I cannot find how to solve the following problem without using a section:

I have a couple of books reviews, each is an article within a magazine. Now I want to provide different lists of the book reviews for the users:

• listed by author,
• listed by title
• listed by thematic content.
  In each list the sorting item should be formatted as the heading – so one list would have authors names as headings, the other list titles as headings.

Until now I did this using custom fields and by providing a section for the call of the list.
So I have the section “Literature-Author”, another section “Literature-Title” and so on.
By calling the section in the URL the matching list shows.
Within the sections page-template there is an article_custom call – based on the used section -, which provides the sorting and invokes a matching form doing the formatting by sorting item.

Now I’m looking for a way to do the same thing without using different sections.

And here my questions arise:
Is there a way to call a section or category (by URL) and give it/add a code/hint/signal which determines how the results have to be sorted and which form is to be used? (I think that would be the basic infos to provide).
I didn’t find any help on syntax of messy URLs or something like that.

Maybe I completely missed any existing concept.
Thank you for any hint.