Support archive

Search multiple channels with different custom fields

louisk 16 Dec 2014 12:38 question, complete

I was puzzling with the native channel tag but then thought it might be better with Low Search. I have no idea if Low Search is the right way to go though.

My situation:
I have 3 channels: Articles, Instagram, Twitter.
With a checkbox an article can be a: blog, press or news item.
I have 3 pages: Blog, News, Videos.

On the pages I would like to display:
Blog page > articles(type=blog), instagram, twitter
News page > articles(type=news|press)
Video page > articles(type=news|press|blog where channel_videos_field=not_empty), instagram(there video_url=not_empty)

The thing is, I would like to limit the output of the page to 30 items.

For this question I would only like to focus on the video page.

How do I display posts from 3 different channels with ONLY videos sorted by date on one page?

In the EE docs and in the Low Search docs you can use the search: param but you cants specify to which channel you apply the search:field param.

Replies

1. Low 16 Dec 2014 12:52

   If the two channels don't share the same fields, than that wouldn't be possible out of the box. However, you could create a custom filter to allow for this specific case.

2. louisk 16 Dec 2014 13:33

   Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately that would go beyond my knowledge.
   
   I think this should be basic behaviour of the native channel tag, actually.
   If it supplies the ability to combine multiple channels entries in the output, and the search: param, why assume that all fields have the same name? You're not even allowed to give the same field name even though they are in different channels...
   
   

    
    {exp:channel:entries 
        channel='articles|videos|news' 
   
        search:[channel:articles]:article_videos="not IS_EMPTY" 
        search:[channel:videos]:video_url="not IS_EMPTY" 
        search:[channel:news]:news_video="not IS_EMPTY" 
   
        limit="30"} 
    

3. Low 16 Dec 2014 13:45

   I think this should be basic behaviour of the native channel tag, actually. 

   Yeah, I can understand. However, that's not how the current (native) search:field works. You could file a feature request with EllisLab. In the meantime, a custom query/filter would help. If you can't do that yourself, I could create it for you, for a fee. Contact me if you're interested in that.