Using Channel Field to populate an individual page

Question

Less of a question or more of an opportunity to see what other EE devs think.

The site I'm working on has a list of different City Markets and each Market has the same core pages like Directions & Parking, Admission & Policies, and Seating Policy.

Currently we're using Structure to create each one of the core pages under the specific City Market. As we continue to expand though I think it's going to be a bit unwieldy to have all these pages on the backend especially when there's an edit that needs to happen across all the City Markets.

My thought is that I create a Channel Field for each core page in the City Market Channel Entry. So Directions & Parking would be a field, Admissions & Policies would be a field, etc. Then I would use URL segment variables to designate which City Market Channel and which Channel Field to pull from to populate a core page in a City Market. So /austin/admissions would pull from the Admissions & Policies Channel Field in the Austin entry for City Markets.

Does that make sense and if it does what do you think about the solution?

Answer 1

Yes, I've used this approach myself a number of times and it works well (though I've not used it with Structure, i would think the approach would still work), particularly if you are able to wrap the conditional with Croxton's switchee add-on to early parse the matching segments. So you'd have something like this:

{exp:channel:entries channel="markets" url_title="{segment_2}" disable="whatever|you|do|not|need" limit="1"}
    {exp:switchee parse="inward" variable="{segment_3}"}
        {case value="admissions"}
           {my_admissions_custom_field_or_more_than_one_if_needed}
        {/case}
        {case value="parking"}
           {my_parking_custom_field_or_more_than_one_if_needed}
        {/case}
        {case value="seating"}
           {my_seating_custom_field_or_more_than_one_if_needed}
        {/case}
        {case value="something_else"}
           {my_psomethingelse_custom_field_or_more_than_one_if_needed}
        {/case}
    {/exp:switchee}
{/exp:channel:entries}