How to structure data: Solo Events (Lectures) and Group of Events (Conferences)

Question

I am working on my first craft project and am wondering how to create the following data structure:

I have a page with a large archive of solo-events (lectures, discussions etc). I think I will use a channel with categories for this.

In addition, there is a second content type: a conference. A conference is a group of solo-events. For example, several lectures and discussions.

The conference as a container has certain fields (picture, text) and the solo-events have other fields (speakers for example).

I wonder what is the best way in Craft to enable this form of container.

Example:

Solo-Events:

• Event 1 with Speaker a
• Event 2 with Speaker b

…

Conferences:

• Conference A

-- Event A1 with Speaker c

-- Event A2 with Speaker d

• Conference B

-- Event B1 with Speaker e

-- Event B2 with Speaker f

…

In the Frontend I would like to have:

Speakers-Archive: I think this will be the easy one. For the speaker I would like to work with a channel and link them to the events.

Solo-Events and Conference-Archive:

A list with all solo-events and all conferences but without the sub-events. So, this list should contain: Event 1, Event 2, Conference A, Conference B (A1, A2, B1, B2 should be excluded)

I am wondering how to deal with this idea of grouping the events to conferences:

I was thinking:

1. Two channels, events and conferences.

   All events (solo and conference-related) are in one channel. For a conference (second channel) I can select the events which I want to include. For the archive list I need to exclude all the solo-events that are part of conferences. This may not be optimal in terms of performance and user experience in the backend

2. Structure for Confernces and a Channel for Solo-Events

   The conferences are the parent elements, the solo events are the child elements. But how can I create different fields for the parents and children?

3. Structure with Entry Types:

   I wonder if i can work with entry type here as well. But But how can I bring the Entry Type together with the Hierarchy? So that Parent is always a conference and a children is an Event?

4. Matrix Field:

   The Conferences has a matrix field to store the individual events. But I dont like this approach because I think it would be hard to get all the speaker from a conferences matrix field and combine them with the speaker from the solo-events to get one list with all speaker

5. Categories.

   all events are stored in one channel and I create a Categorie for the Conferences. It feels kind of wrong-headed because the Conference (in my understanding) is the parent of the event rather than the category.

What do you think?

At the moment I am trying the second approach:

{# get all conferences (parents) (level =1 )  from a structure and merge with all solo-events from a channel#}

{% set entriesConferences = craft.entries.section('conferences').level(1).ids() %}
{% set entriesEvents = craft.entries.section(['events']).ids() %}

{# Combine those IDs #}
{% set entryIdsCombined = entriesConferences | merge(entriesEvents) %}

{# Get all entries (so, no IDs this time), using your IDs, order by date#}
{% set allEntries = craft.entries.id(entryIdsCombined).order('datumUhrzeit desc') %}

Is there a better (in terms of performance, scalability and user experience in the backend) way to archive this?

I asked this question Oli from the craft team and he gave me an answer that he will hopefully add here as well.

Thanks!

Answer 1

My approach:

• Create one channel for events with different entry types (solo-events, conference-events)
• Create one channel for conferences
• Re-use the date fields in both channels
• That way you can fetch and order events by the re-used date fields from both channels limiting to the entry types of solo-events and conferences with one query. That makes listings, filtering and paging easy.
• Conference-events can be eager-loaded with the query as well
• The entry type for conference-events has a mandatory entry field for the conference
• In the control panel you can show the related conference by adding the field as a column in the overview
• Speakers is another channel or structure being linked from within the conference-events

Why I would not use:

• Matrix: can be easily queried but can not eager load the entry it belongs to
• Category: feels wrong to always add categories for new conferences
• Structures for events: Structure are not 100% user friendly when adding new entries, as they always need to be sorted manually (though there are some improvements in 3.7 coming up)