Bend Structure to meet goals

Question

We're having to use structure to do what would normally be pretty straight forward, now need to know if this scenario is even possible:

Main URL Structure:
discipline01 URL://discipline01
  --Child01  URL://discipline01/Child01
  --Child02  URL://discipline01/Child02
discipline02
  --Child03
discipline03
  --Child04

"discipline0X" are all top level "pages", "Child0X" are sub "pages".

I initially set this up as Pages with child pages (as per above) and it worked. Now word is we need to keep these "Child" items but have them exist in multiple "top level pages" like this:

discipline01 URL://discipline01
  --Child01  URL://discipline01/Child01
  --Child02  URL://discipline01/Child02
  --Child03  URL://discipline01/Child03
discipline02
  --Child01  URL://discipline02/Child01
  --Child03  URL://discipline02/Child03
… etc

No amount of faffing around yields the results I seek. The top level "pages" form the basis for the main navigation (just to compound things). Can't create template.groups as top level items may change.

Categories are the pseudo logical solution but Structure with Categories seems umm, inadequate ?

Ideally, Structure should manage all this content.

"Listings" are great except they only apply to one item. "Assets" - dont fit

I'm about to punch something, please, any inisghts welcome!

Answer 1

Is this a typo whilst copy/pasting or are discipline02 children meant to cross-link to discipline01 children?

discipline02
  --Child01  URL://discipline01/Child01
  --Child03  URL://discipline01/Child03

If I understand correcly I'm not sure Structure is the best fit in this situation. Structure largely exists to provide that familiar page-based CMS system to those used to it but EE by default is more of a resource description framework (i.e. it deals with streams/channels of content). Unless it's a strict one-to-one relationship with pages and URLs then Structure probably isn't the best thing to run this setup through.

I don't know what the child pages are or even the disciplines from what you've provided but I would take it back to channels and categories. You could have a 'discipline' channel and then use categories to manage their hierarchy. That way you could apply a 'discipline' entry to both 'discipline01' and discipline02' and the URLs would follow the template_group/template structure. with a few cunning condtional segment variable checks you could make it appear in multiple locations.

Hopefully that makes sense but if you're still in need of advice just let me know.