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ADDING SUPPLIERS (ARTISTS/BANDS)
Doing It The Easy Way
When it comes to populating his Supplier and Item tables, Mike clearly is going to need help from the community. The best approach in situations like this, where one does not have pre-existing or comprehensive data to work with, is to let others create it for you. We will suppose that by hook or crook Mike either knows how to contact garage band members, or knows of someone else who knows how to do it. If that is the case he can simply make an appeal to garage bands to come visit his site and fill out his Garage Band Profile submission form. They can also submit separate audio and video tracks too.
To set this up Mike visits the administrative Configure > Submit / Join page where he finds all the variables that relate to user submissions and signups. In particluar Mike is currently interested in the section labeled Supplier Submissions / Yellow Page Placements.
Let's look in detail at some of the important configuration variables that control the way in which members can submit records to the database for consideration. We are concentrating here on Supplier submissions, but the things said here also apply to Item submissions as well (handled, naturally enough, by the section labeled Item Submissions / Category Placements).
When this variable is toggled to Yes every page in the Yellow Pages branch will display an Add Supplier link at the top. When members click on this link they will be shown a form that allows them to submit a supplier listing for consideration by the Review Foundry webmaster. This is exactly what Mike wants.
It is possible to allow members to submit Supplier profiles for consideration but have the administrator, or an editor, specify the final Yellow Page on which the Supplier will appear. However, that is definitely not what we want here. While we could look at, say, the Supplier.addr_state and Supplier.addr_city fields to determine which yellowpage to assign the record, that is extra work Mike doesn't need to do. So we allow the member to specify a yellowpage assignment to go with the submission.
In general we might allow members to assign their Supplier Profile to many different Yellow Pages. In this case, however, where a geographical location defines each Yellow Page, we only want to allow a unique assignment, so Mike would select 1 for the value of permitted_yellowpage_per_supplier.
Finally, Mike wants to force members to supply a Yellow Page assigment, not just make it an optional specification to go along with the Supplier Profile submission, so he selects required here.
Now all Mike has to do is herd garage bands to his site and have them submit a band profile which he can either approve or reject via the Moderate section of the administrative control panels.
Adding Extra Fields
We could spend some time here discussing how Mike might expand the scope of his Garage Band Profile pages by adding extra Supplier table columns to record, say, the musical influences that a band offers up when creating its profile page, plus a host of other pieces of information that fans might find interesting. However, the step-by-step process behind adding columns of this nature has already been covered in some detail in How To Create A Social Review Site: ADDING EXTRA FIELDS.
Instead we will use the next section of this tutorial to concentrate on how to add useful columns to the Item table. In particular we will see how to add audio and video file columns that allow bands to upload music tracks or clips which can then be listened to, or viewed, or downloaded, and which can be reviewed by fans.
Next Section: ADDING ITEMS (AUDIO TRACKS / VIDEO CLIPS)
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