How to manage data besides pages

Hi, I’m having a hard time describing what’s exactly my problem, so I will give you an example that hopefully makes it clear:

The situation

For a client I’m building one website for technically two companies. Sounds weird, but just assume that it makes sense in this case :wink: Each company has a team page team members on it, some of those appearing on both team pages. Team members also appear in a site-wide blog as authors. Each company also has a job board where those team members are listed as contacts for specific jobs.

The problem

There should be only one source for the all the team members and they shouldn’t be mixed with the pages that are shown in the panel. So basically I want to have a new section in the panel where I only manage team members. Those team members should then be available as options for a panel field.

Is this at all possible with Kirby 2? If yes, how? :smiley: If not, will it be possible with Kirby 3?

Thanks in advance,
Robert

This should be doable with a custom Panel page, you could, for example, store these team members for example in a database. You can then use a custom select field to query the database.

Depending how the content for these two companies is stored, you could also store the team members as normal pages that are then hidden from the dashboard widget. A standard select will then do the job.

Examples for custom Panel pages can be found here:



Thanks @texnixe, I didn’t know you could create custom Panel pages. That seems like exactly what I needed. Also thank you for the examples you gave me. Creating custom Panel pages would be a great topic for the Cookbook :slight_smile:

Why does it have to be a separate Panel page, btw? Why not use a page that is hidden from the pages widget but is accessible via its own widget?

@texnixe That would work, too. But then you’d have all those page settings in the sidebar (or some of them at least) and it would be nicer for the client to have a page called team members which is focused on this one particular task.

The page settings can be removed via the blueprint option settings.

On the plus side, you would have all editor options, from uploading files to creating new subpages, easy access to all field types, markdown syntax etc. without having to recreate all that stuff.

That’s true. I will give it a shot. I would love it if I could just do it like this obviously :slight_smile: