Trying to work out the right field for a set list…

The CMS Questions
1

I’m creating a site for a band, an archive of their concert recordings. Each post will have a set list of songs they played - and it makes sense to use fields that can consistently pre-populate the song titles, rather than writing them out each time in a textarea. In the future, it might useful to do more than output a list, e.g how many times ‘Song X’ has been performed live, what album is ‘Song X’ from? etc…

The parent field will be structure, and I think select makes sense for each entry. However, this only outputs the slug of each option, rather than the text. Am I on the right lines here? Does select make sense (also considering tags)? Is there a better approach that allows for the text to be output - should I be looking at dynamic options to do more with the data?

2

Could you please post your blueprint and what you are doing to render the output for some context what the fields contain?

3

Thanks, here’s what I’ve got in my blueprint (edited for brevity)

setlist:
  label: Set list
  type: structure
  fields:
    track:
      type: select
      options:
        song-name-one: Song Name One
        song-name-two: Song Name Two

And the template is as follows:

<?php if ($page->setlist()->isNotEmpty()): ?>
<h3>Set list</h3>
<ol>
	<?php foreach ($page->setlist()->toStructure() as $track): ?>
			<li>
					<?= $track->track() ?>
			</li>
	<?php endforeach ?>
</ol>
<?php endif ?>
4

The easiest option would be to store the song titles like you want to output them, no need to use key-value pairs, so

options:
   - "Song Name One"
   - "Song Name Two"

If that’s not an option, you would have to get the text value from the stored string by reading the page blueprint:

5

If it’s just a single element within the structure field, you might consider using an Entries field type instead though maybe not a big difference from Structure to matter.

If the list of songs is known/static (won’t need new ones added later), there’s probably a few options for how to handle. e.g. You could list them all as options in the blueprint or build out unpublished pages and grab the title using a query to set options in a Select menu, pull data in as options from a static JSON file, etc.

If the song list isn’t fixed (may need new ones in the future), it might be best to have a way to edit them within the panel and have the list therefore auto-update.

6

How about creating a separate child page for each song and then selecting it in the pages field of the setlist? This gives you flexibility and allows you to expand the concept as needed, for example, to include additional information such as the year of release, playing time, the associated album, or even the complete lyrics.

7

Thanks very much everyone! First of all, didn’t occur to me that I could just have the text value in the select options. I’ve been playing with all the suggestions, and I reckon @GB_DESIGN has nailed it with having songs as child pages. Thanks all!

1 Like
8

Just wanted to follow up on this! The site in question launched today, and I just wanted to thank folks again for allowing me to pick your brains on structuring data. I learned a lot of new Kirby skills on this project that only make me love this CMS even more.

https://starsofthelidforever.com/