Request: Can the Choose Article: drop down menu be enhanced to also include article items that have been related to the chosen category? Or, could a second drop down be added to provide a listing of related articles to the selected category? Selecting an item from either drop down list would validate.
Problem: When the ‘Type of display’ in an instance of EP is set to ‘Article Display’ and there is no approved article specifically located in the category selected the following message is shown on screen “There is not an approved version of this item to display.”
This message makes sense except in the following scenario.
Scenario:
· The site contains a College News section
· One category with many subcategories
· Each category and subcategory have their own DNN page
· Each page contains two instances of EP
1. Left nav is the same on every page (Custom List – set to show category items for the College News category)
2. Body
§ College News parent category page set to ‘Category Feature Display’ and not set as overridable so no articles actually display on this page.
§ Child category pages set to ‘Article Display’ AND configured for ‘Category Display Settings’ set to ‘Article’
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Category Names
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EP Configuration
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Parent category
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College News
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Category Feature Display
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Child subcategories
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2010
Alumni & Community
Arts & Humanities
Behavioral Health and Social Sciences
Business
Campus
Engineering Technology
Events
Lifelong Learning
Math & Science
Students & Clubs
2009 Archives
2008 Archives
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Article Display AND configured for ‘Category Display Settings’ set to ‘Article’
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· Site not live yet - Every College News article entered in to EP is being saved into one of the YEAR categories (2010, 2009 Archives or 2008 Archives) and related to other sibling categories as appropriate such as Alumni & Community, Arts & Humanities etc…
Desired Performance: When a visitor clicks on any item in the left nav custom list of subcategories the next view they see is a custom list of the available article items in or related to that chosen category, each teased with Title, Date, Description, Thumbail and “Read More…” The visitor could then click any article item and that instance of EP would refresh with the actual article content.
Problem Continued: In the above scenario there are 14 subcategories but Article items really will only exist in one of the three YEAR subcategories and are related to the others as appropriate.
When configuring each instance of EP on all 14 DNN pages only the three YEAR pages are fully configurable. Because no articles actually exist in most of the sibling categories it isn’t possible to select anything in the Basic Settings, Choose Article: drop down menu.
Note: I attempted to make the EP produce a selectable item in the Basic Settings, Choose Article: drop down menu by relating one article from the 2010 subcategory to all of the sibling subcategories. This seems to work in Manage Content where I see the same article available to edit in every Article Category I select that the item has been related to. Unfortunately the Basic Settings, Choose Article: drop down menu didn’t care and continues to show no items for any ‘empty’ categories I select.
I also tested changing the that article’s Display Page Options to Current Page and A Specific Page but neither caused the article items title to appear in the Basic Settings, Choose Article: drop down menu.
Is there an existing setting that I am missing that would allow this configuration scenario?