Site Structure - Easier Way?

[dillon]

I've got three categories under site navigation.
Let's use: Dogs, Cats and Fish
When you click on the animal type dog, the site navigation should disappear and in its place another module (i think a module) should be there with a listing of the different types of dogs. There should be a center module displaying general information about dogs. So I would need a module for each dog type correct? German Shepards, Pitbulls, Pugs, etc. so that when you click on the link in the menu, it opens the information on that dog type in the middle.

Then I would need to have 3 different pages, one for each of the categories? Does this sound right? or is there an easier way to accomplish this?

So let me see if I got this...
A module is simply the collapsable information box. It can have anything in it, plain text, code, etc.
A page is the entire page, which holds the modules.

Thanks.

[KW802]

So let me see if I got this...
A module is simply the collapsable information box. It can have anything in it, plain text, code, etc.
A page is the entire page, which holds the modules.Yep, you got it. A module is an individual object and a page is a collection of one or more modules.

[dillon]

So if I've got 50 different breeds under each of the three different categories, I'm going to have 150 total modules. Then on the page setting options, it'd list all 150 modules with checkboxes next to each one of them.

So I'd need to create a page for each of the 150 modules, so that when you click on the link it brings up that particular module?

Thanks.

[KW802]

Frankly, from what you're describing it'd be way better to create some SQL tables with the information in it and then pull the data from the tables so you can use just a handful of modules instead of creating a static module for each dog.

[dillon]

I can create a table no problem. But pulling the information in is what I'm not sure about. Do you know of any examples or hacks?

Thanks.

[dillon]

Perhaps some sort of content management hack? I'm sure somebody else has run into the same thing. It'd be nice to have something to upload all of the data, categories, etc.

Thanks.

[sean]

I'm not sure if this would help you at all, but why don't you just use one of the article systems/addons available at vbulletin.org? one that you might want to take a look at is vbarticles.com.

It doesn't really do that navigation thing that you asked for, but you can create categories and submit articles to each, set some to featured articles as well. Plus you don't have to create new templates or anything each time you submit an article.

just a suggestion.