Farmer's Market
Pages in the Farmer's Market, with their associated produce lists, represent a fairly complex set of inter-relations. Understanding how the various node types, cck fields, categories, and views fit together will take some time. However, setting up and maintaining a Farmer's Market page is not hard, but you need to be quite careful to get the relationships right:
- Add a new term to the "Lasqueti Market" category for the new producer.
** This term must be the same as the path of the Market page (case insensitive).
These terms are used to create the Farmer's Market (market_products view), listing products for each farm - it shows a list of available products tagged with each term. - Add a new Market Page for the new producer.
** This must be a Market Page so that the "mini-gallery" (created by template.php using the product_gallery view) can be attached .
** The page must be tagged with Topic category term "Farmer's Market".
** The URL path for this page must be the same as the Lasqueti Market category term (case insensitive). This allows Taxonomy Redirect to redirect links from the category term directly to the page (since the term name and the page's URL path are the same).
Thus, a "Famer's Market page" is a Market Page, tagged with Topic "Farmer's Market, with the same URL path as a term in the Lasqueti Market category. These rules are used to identify these pages in the code - so pages that don't adhere will not be considered part of the Farmer's Market, and won't work correctly. This is a little sketchy, perhaps even a bit hacky, and limits the re-use of the Product node type ouside the Farmer's Market - but it was expedient, and seemed cleaner than creating a new node type or yet another taxonomy. Although the Topic category is used to identify Farmer's Market pages, the Lasquti Market term and URL path still need to be identical for Taxonomy Redirect to work.
The Author of a correctly configured Farmer's Market page will see two new tabs on their page:
- Edit Product List
This shows the my_products view that allows the author to edit, delete, and change the availability of their produce. - Add Product
This is simply a short-cut to the Add Product form.
These two tabs are created by the custom Lasqueti Menu module - they are "dynamic" local menu items. It is important to note that only the page author will see these tabs, so once the admin gives authorship over to another user, they won't see these tabs anymore. I could not figure out how to make this work so admin always sees all.
There are three distinct "Product List" views:
- market_products view is used to display the "products-by-producer" lists on the Farmer's Market page. The most staightforward way to create this view was by using a taxonomy (since I already had a module to list nodes-by-term). This is why each product must be tagged with the correct "Lasqueti Market" category. The alternative would be some custom code that first finds all Farmer's Market pages, then, for each one, selects all product nodes that have a node reference to that page. This will be quite a bit slower, and represents a significant effort - thus I adopted the taxonomy route because it was easy to implement, expedient, and efficient. Note that this view does not use the node reference field at all!
- product_gallery view is used to display a list of products related to a given producer, in their Market Page's mini-gallery. Again, I already had the code to produce a mini-gallery using a node reference. In this case, using the node refernce was the expedient and effiecient way to generate the view, because you already have the Market Page node itself (it is the one being displayed!). It would be possible to use the taxonomy term (which is the same as the Market Page title, remember!) to create this view, using the term as an argument passed into the view. That would eliminate the need for the node reference field in the Product node. Hmmm... seems like a reasonable idea now that I think of it - but that would mean the Product node would lose its "This product is related to...." link - although the Market page would still be linked from the product via the taxonomy term and Taxonomy Redirect. Perhaps worth investigating to simplify things a bit.
- my_products view is used to display a list of products authored by an individual, and is shown on the "Edit Product List" tab for Farmer's Market pages. This could be confusing if one person is "owner" of multiple Market pages, because I could not find a simple way to filter the products by the node being viewed (since I don't have that context). I suspect this will be possible with Views2. For now, this lists all of a user's products, regardless of which page they relate to.
The upshot?
When user's create a new product, they need to select both the correct Lasqueti Market taxonomy (so the product is listed correctly in the Farmer's Market) and the correct Market Page node reference (so the product is added to their mini-gallery). The node reference selector uses the user_pages view to restict them to selecting references to only pages they own. This is good because it avoids confusion and mistakes, but it is bad because it means the admin cannot create these node reference links without first "masquarading" as the author of the page. The Lasqueti Market category terms would be more difficult to restrict in this way, so they are open, and thus prone to error.
This reliance on authorship for a number of the functions (e.g., edit tab availablitity, node editing access, node reference list, etc.) also implies that only one person can manage a given market page. It is certainly possible to set-up group access and do things based on groups rather than author, but there would be a lot of overhead (and extra work!). An easy workaround would be to create a group ID for the website that all members of the group could use to update the shared resource.
