Hey guys and gals,

I am working on a version of Links for a hobby site of mine.

What I am doing is building a links directory for a college site.

The deal is that I want to have business listing AND just plain old site links, some with business info (i.e. phone) and the others not no detailed info.

I know it sounds confusing, take a ride with me here.

A user comes to my site.
He click on the Real Estate link and goes to a sub cat then on to the listings of links.

Now since this is a real estate link, I have it build a detailed page. On this page will be the info for the phone and address, etc. Now since I know that some businesses do not have a link I have set it up to detect if there is NO link, it doesnt give it on the detailed page. i.e. doesn't show up. Thus the user doesnt click on somewhere and be misled.

NOW, if it is a regular link, i.e. snap.com it doesnt build a 'detailed page' just gives the JUMP url to the site, that way a page doesnt come up with extraneous info about the address.

Hope you followed me.

I think it will be nice, that way I can combine a links directory with a business directory.

Now I guess you are wondering how I am going to have these variables set up when someone ads to the resources.

he will have a form like the usual but with the added fields (i.e. phone, address).

He will also be informed that if he has a URL to input it, if not leave it blank, this is how we can get to show up or not show on the detailed page.

Then how do we know if he wants to have a detailed page because he is a business? We have a check box, are you a business or just a site? Then he checks yes or no which triggers the Detailed="??" variable.

I know its long. I build my sites using the site_html.pl NOT the templates so I couldnt help you there, but for sure just wanted to let you know it can be done.

I've got it all working script wise, the forms and layout isnt there yet, so I'll post soon.

Thanks
Mike

Hi, your site is similar to how mines is setup. I developed 3 basic parts to the site powered by Links 2. People can add their regular links with will use the jump.pl. If they have a cgi script, they have the option to fill in a detail box with html tags if they wish. I am using templates that will detect if the detail box is filled, if so, it will launch the user to the detailed page. I then customized the detailed page for my 3rd section, the web hosts. Since web hosts carry different information than cgi scripts, I had to add more fields and changed my detail template to detect if a certain field is filled in. If a certain box for the web hosts is filled, then it displays the details and a full description with html. The only trouble with all of this is that I had to juggle around with alot of variables and had to make sure that it will be easy to submit sites to the directory. The submission part is the hard part which right now, I am making a help html file for it. You can take a look at my site with the Gossamer-Threads template at http://www.techdevelopers.com



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