Category Custom Fields/Variables?

[tfw2005]

This is not a necessary situation, but just a thought.

I would like a situation where you can apply a variable to each category, similar to a customfield text entry area. This would be available to enter on the create/edit category pages for each one.

Then, this variable is available to call into modules, header/footer/pages of browsecategory and showentry pages.

Basically, I would like to have modules display wide ranging content based on the specific category you are viewing. Such as an RSS feed block on the category sidebar, or "more around the site for this topic" on the showentry page, without having to code if statements for all the cats.

I can just put "http://yahoo.com/feed.xml?topic=$variable" in my module, and it will pull the right feed from the desired site. So if my category is about Politics, it pulls Yahoo's Politics feed onto the sidebar. Because I entered the proper variable in their otherwise similarly-formatted RSS URLs (http://yahoo.com/feed.xml?topic=Politics). I have the RSS parser and coding to work for that already. Or folks can use javascript from the external site if they offer it, one would just need a specific variable in the code for most situations.

For showentry, non-RSS situations, a template variable would be nice, like "show adv_dyna_module_morearound_$variable" - Variable being specific to that category. And I custom code HTML links to other areas of the site about that topic. Forums, Gallery, Articles, etc.

Similar to how you can choose to only show other entries from the sub-cat you are in with the new/random module, but more open so that you can create as many different types of custom modules based on cats as you want.

[Brian]

Honestly, I don't think that's something that would be used enough to really warrant adding it to the default files. You could always add a new column to the adv_dyna_categories table though and alter the admin files a bit to add a new input field to allow you to change the value of that column.