Forum for discussing general topics related to Couch.
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Hello,

I want to figure out if couchcms will be usefull for this project… (Would be the first couch driven site)
Mainly I want to create a website for a real estate company containing different projects.

A PROJECT with different kind of information (custom fields? :description, pictures, additional info,…) should be placed in a certain CITY. That CITY lies in a certain AREA.

The above info should be accessible from the site menu which is dynamic driven at a certain point (front-end menu: containing both static and dynamic data) and the site owner should have a simple structure in the back-end to ad all this information.

eg. SITE MENU (front-end):
REALISTIONS
- AREA1
-- CITY1
-- CITY2
--- PROJECT1
--- PROJECT2
--- PROJECT3
--- PROJECT4
--- ...
-- CITY3
-- ...
- AREA2
- AREA3
-…

Back-end (user friendly):
Here the site owner should be able to select:
-AREA: create multiple areas
-CITY: create multiple cities and link it to an area
-PROJECT: create multiple projects with all the extra properties and link the project to a city

How will couch handle this easily? I want to keep things simply structured. How do I need to see this in practice?


Next to that I suppose will need to create some custom queries to sort things out, but I assume this will be possible with some basic knowledge of PHP and SQL? (Did those things before on custom databases)

just of curiosity:
Besides that, will I be able to create custom tables in the Database and integrate that information in the cms?


If certain points are not possible, maybe I can have a workaround...
I want to know if I could use couchcms or need to start from scratch with some sort of custom cms...

Any feedback is very much appreciated, thanks!
Hi Divian,

I can see two approaches for such a site -
1. Create 'areas', 'cities' and 'projects' as separate clonable templates and then relate them to each other using 'related pages' feature.
2. Use just a single clonable template for 'projects' and create the 'areas' and 'cities' as its folders.

The second approach would be the simplest for you provided the 'areas' and 'cities' entities do not need custom fields themselves (apart from the text description and image that a folder can have). The 'projects' template can have all the custom fields you want.

>> MENU
The folder/pages structure lends itself naturally to the kind of hierarchical menu structure you are looking for so that shouldn't be any problem.

>> QUERIES
As for the queries - the queries can easily be run on the custom fields of 'projects' template e.g. 'All projects with 3 bedrooms and an area of nn sq.ft' etc. (with further filtering done on the parent folders e.g. 'All projects within XXX city or YYY area' etc.). These will require no knowledge of SQL at all.

Apart from this, Couch now also has the capability of executing custom SQL queries, so anything not covered can be handled by this.

will I be able to create custom tables in the Database and integrate that information in the cms?

Yes you can but then that would require a fair understanding of underlying table structures and SQL.

I'd suggest you first chalk out the kind of queries you'd want to run. This'll help us determining if Couch would be a good fit for your site.

Do let me know. Thanks.
2 posts Page 1 of 1