By math-hew on

I'm in one of those situations where I've got something working OK, but I have that "there must be a better way" feeling.

Quick summary: I'm building a new website for a college. Our admissions department has six counselors, each of whom is responsible for a region of the country (Northeast, Midwest, etc.). Each region, of course, contains several states. I'm building a "Who is my admissions counselor?" page where prospective students can select their state and it shows them the info on the counselor responsible for that state.

The way I'm doing this now: I added a node for each counselor, then created a "states" taxonomy with all 50 states in it, and assigned the states to each counselor via a multi-select CCK field. This ignores the "region" entirely, but for end users that's OK - they don't know or care how we define regions anyway. Then I'm using an exposed filter in Views (Taxonomy: Term ID (with depth)) to create the drop-down for students to select their state and see who their counselor is. This works fine as far as the front end goes.

The problem is, we've got a high turnover rate with our counselors, so it's pretty common for all of the regions to be redistributed among the counselors. The regions themselves don't change often, but the counselors responsible for them frequently do. The way I have this set up now, someone's going to need to go through and manually change the states for every counselor - kind of a pain.

I'm curious as to whether anyone else has had a similar situation, and how they wound up dealing with it. Thanks in advance for any advice!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

I think I would "flip" the logic.

I would start with a content type Counselors, it would include information about the Counselor such as first name, last name ect. I would probably use node auto title to construct the title from first and last name.

I would then add a content type called Region and associate a region with states. I would also include a reference (using node reference) to counselors.

While you might need to add a counselor you could then change the counselor for a region by editing the region and changing the reference.

The view would directly look up regions but by using a relationship on the reference for counselor you could display information about the counselor.