Calendar-based Content Displayal like Lumosity

Question

Sorry, I don't know how else to describe this (as in the title). So have you all seen Lumosity's logged-in user page? Basically, it shows a calendar with today's date (Sunday, for example), and games to play for that date. Then, when you login the next day, it'll show that it is Tuesday, and it'll give a selection of games to play for Tuesday.

Is there a way to do this with ExpressionEngine, where you pull and display random content each day (different content every 24 hours) from a channel (pool of content)?

Or to make it even more complex, say we want to display 5 content entries. How do we pull 1 entry from 5 different channels, so that the 5 content entries we want to display are all of different types?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You could build a simple add-on that extends the Channel Entry loop and sets the entry_id="" parameter based on the random ID's it grabs.

You could select the entry_ids to load with a method such as those found at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18346047/select-record-from-database-randomly-based-on-time

You can read about extending Channel Entries here: http://dmlogic.com/blog/extending-the-expression-engine-channel-module/

So your add-on may look like this

{exp:date_entries channel="games" limit="5"}
    <li>{title} - <a href="/game/play/{url_title}/">Play now &raquo;</a></li>
{/exp:date_entries}

If you wanted to load from 5 different channels you could make your addon do that too by using a pipe delimiter so for example

{exp:date_entries channel="mind-games|trivia|technology|history|science|visual" limit="5"}

Your add-on would then run the SQL query against the channels listed above.

Let me know how you get on.