[Plugin: CataBlog] links to images and searchable ability

rcktech

thank you for your interest in CataBlog. I will answer your questions to the best of my ability.

Question 1: Can CataBlog link to files?
Answer: Yes, you can put anything you want inside the hyperlink field, including full and local paths to any PDF file you might have on your server. If you need to have the thumbnail be a link look into CataBlog’s HTML Template controls which let you setup custom ways of displaying each catalog item. Also you can enable HTML in the description of your catalog item so you can put links in the description field of items as well. Also, you can easily setup your template to automatically add anything at the end or beginning of every description.

Question 2: Does CataBlog have search capability?
Answer: No, CataBlog currently is not searchable, with a few quick hacks you could enable the searchable and viewable properties of the custom post types giving you a gateway to each catalog item and the ability to search them. But even with that you would still need to build an interface to capture the user’s search and submit the query to WordPress. I think a more custom solution built to your exact needs might be better suited for your second project, especially since I have no idea how CataBlog, or WordPress for that matter will preform with thousands of posts. If you want to experiment with a lot of catalog item’s look into using the XML import feature, it should be easy enough to have your database output a properly formatted XML file.

Good Luck,
– Zach

thanks Zack

UPDATE

you may use a plugin to index shortcode content and get pages with search keywords in the catalog in your search results without any hacks. Simply download and install a plugin that expands and then indexes the shortcodes of all your posts.

Hi rcktech,

Did you ever get a sheet music catalog plugin to work?

I’m looking for the exact same solution for brassmusician.com

It’s basically a database plugin I’m looking for, with the fields:
Title (text), Composer name (text), Instrument (text), Excerpt (image), link to recording on iTunes (button)

The database needs to be searchable and sortable. My thought being that the user input fields and search results (text) could always be visible at the top of the page, with the image appearing underneath.

Any suggestions much appreciated!

No Luck!!!

I spent a lot of hours looking for this, I gave up, I stopped looking but if you find something please put a note here.

thank you,

brassmusician,

It sounds to me like you want a customized theme, perhaps with a custom post type built into your theme and specific interface controls to browse through your custom post types. CataBlog falls short unless you are a programmer who knows how to integrate the plugin with your theme’s template files (not to be confused with CataBlog’s template files).

Also, while I appreciate the simplicity of your desired database, I have to say that almost every time I have done similar work in the past it gets complex very quickly. Now maybe I’m wrong in this instance, just keep in mind that databases are not exactly spreadsheets.

Also consider the overhead of WordPress, true you can turn it into a social network with buddy press and you can create large catalogs for people to browse…but if you are thinking that you want some couple hundred items, and a site with good performance, I would recommend a real CMS (content management system) built from a RAD (rapid application development) framework that uses a database ORM (object relational mapping) such as Symfony or Zend Framework.

Otherwise you should consider creating your catalog of sheet music with regular WordPress posts, perhaps they have a specific parent category or are all in one specific category. You may add meta data (extra fields) and sort / search through them with a few theme hooks and built in widgets. No plugin necessary.

Good luck and if you are looking for a programmer I might send you to my professional site, https://www.illproductions.com.

Cheers!

You may scope out a screenshot of a custom post type admin panel I created for a previous client. Customized integration like this is not free though….

https://catablog.illproductions.com/downloads/custom-post-type.png

macguru,

Thanks for your replies. I’m basically looking to create a searchable version of https://www.hornexcerpts.org integrated into the current https://brassmusician.com

Thanks for the link to your site. I’ll keep it in mind!

ps. What does the front end of the rug site look like?

Brassmusician,

I’m still working on the site, but once it goes live I will give you a link. Basically it works like categorized posts, with archive pages listing multiple rugs and single rug pages with the full rug and all its meta data being displayed. The meta information would be the fields like Size, Origin, Age, etc. Currently the site does not have a search function, but integrating the meta data into the search should be quite easy with a search optimization plugin like relevanssi.

I also want to make sure you understand that without transcribing the sheet music into non image data, only the name of the image would really impact your search results. So that leaves the title and minimal text on the page to bring up search results…is that what you are looking for?

Take care and would love to help you figure out a cool way to archive all this music. Cheers!

Hi macguru,

Thanks for the reply. Actually, what you describe isn’t what I’m looking for. I need a database, with the fields “title, composer, instrument, image-url”. Posts won’t cut it unfortunately. Thanks anyway!

Brassmusician,

I had a thought of using a some kind of “classified” plugin but I the few I found did not have the search capability I was looking for. I wonder if someone can suggest a good combo.

If I find something I’ll post it here and if you find something please share.

Thank you,

Why would a custom post type not cut it? Not scalable enough?

If you are using WordPress as your applications framework then I would really consider using a Custom Post Type as a container or “row” for your proposed “database”. Title is already there, you get lots of other data like date created, author, etc. and your database is backed up alongside with the rest of your site in the WordPress XML export.

Now, you don’t have to use any built in values, it is also very simple to hide them in the Admin Interface. One may also make their own values for a custom post, such as composer, instrument and image-url, or any database columns they may want.

Once you have made all your custom posts or “database rows” you can then show the Posts in a list on an archive page. You may also let WordPress automatically generated you a bunch of pages for each custom post, both are completely optional.

If you need to have an interface to change the WP Query variables its easy enough to build this into your theme. The search function in WordPress can be taught to look at the Custom Posts meta data. Just like single.php and page.php, you now have the ability to make a taxonomy-sheetmusic.php and single-sheetmusic.php files for your custom sheet music posts, this template files can have any number of forms for searching.

Custom Post Types can have as many independent taxonomies as they want, incase you want to treat either of your columns like categories or tags. That might be really useful for the instrument field…

Keep in mind that all CataBlog items are technically Posts, so are Pages and Media uploads.

I myself can’t think of any reason why not to do this, unless you feel that it would be to slow. There is definitely some overhead when you use posts to encapsulate simple database schemas such as your, since there is extra data, but unless you want to query 1000 of records or your server is really slow, I don’t see why not.

Just my thoughts…

Seems like I need to make a “Custom DataBase” plugin that lets you setup a list of fields. All the custom post type stuff could be hidden behind the plugin’s settings panel. As far as search goes, if you aren’t a programmer I assume you would like to pick from a list of form controls and connect those to fields in your custom database. Does anything like this already exist out there? I assume it does….

macguru,

The system would have to be scalable, as the number of records could easily exceed 1000.

I’m not a programmer, but I’m guessing that having a number of users – between 5,000 to 10,000 per week querying wordpress custom posts of say 1000 entries, it may be too heavy for the server.