Basic conceptual questions

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Hi There,

I am just starting to get into concrete5 and have some questions on how to build some standard data-structures. For example: I want do display a catalog of used cars. Each car needs some properties like name, date build, color, engine power, number of wheels, etc...
So far, I would create an new Page Type "Car Page", right? So I can user a page navigation for displaying a list of all the cars, an maybe can create a feature list for the newest.
But what, if i want to display about 500 cars? Where to put all these pages? If i put it right in the page tree this would be very confusing, even if the are all under one page. Or is this the standard procedure for such a task?

Next, I want to create the Car Manufactors, like Ford, GM, BWM etc. Should I create a new Page Type "Manufactor page" for these? And then, of cause, i want to connect one the Manufactors to each car, so giving the Car-Page a property of a Manufactor-Page. How can i achieve this?

So, long question short:
How can describe/build such Data-Structures in concrete5? Are Custom-Pages the right point to start with?

Greets!

 
Kurtopsy replied on at Permalink Reply
Kurtopsy
I would use custom page attributes for the data, such as photos, make, model, year etc. Then use the Page List Pro block to be able to display the page attributes in a nice orderly page. When you add a new page with the attributes, the page list auto populates the new information. You can also use this for sorting.

Here's an example of the C5 page list pro block being used in a similar fashion..
http://cmbatour.com/products-services/list/...
page6 replied on at Permalink Reply
Thanks for your answer!
So far, so good, but what if some of the attributes are having more data than the name? For example the Car Manufactor has a Name, a Logo and a short description. And this Date should be displayed on an own page? So my question is: Is it possible to link pages this way? Does a Car-Page can have a Property "Manufactor-Page"? Or even more other pages, like Car-Type-page or whatever?

Is there a common way to do this in concrete5 or is it not made for managing such kind of data? I'm thinking of a DB-Table with some foreign keys or something like that.
Kurtopsy replied on at Permalink Reply
Kurtopsy
You're welcome. Personally, I would still use page attributes and Page List Pro block. For every variable, there would be an attribute. So manufacturer, manufacturer logo, year, etc. Then you can use a Page List Pro block with a custom template to display these attribute values how you wish. You can also use this block to sort attributes. This would work nice if the end user only wanted to see certain criteria like manufacturer. Then use a custom page type/template to display the attribute data on the individual pages. Defending how different you wanted the car page and manufacturer page, just make another custom page type/template.