Hi

I am planning on building a Travel/Resort related web portal.
I will have a few major categories:
Hotels
Restaurants
Bars
Services
Entertainment
etc.

Each of them may have over 100 listings - text and images

What I need is:

1. To be able to create a template, that will be applicable to all the listing in a particular category.

2. Let's say for the HOTELS category, I would like the viewer to have a choice of displaying the listing alphabetically, by price range, by proximity to the beach or some other criteria.

3. The viewer should be able to choose a particular hotel by a drop down menu.

4. To be able to have a image gallery for each hotel , category or listing.

5. The menu of a particular restaurant to be in a new frameless window.

I believe that if I can accomplish this I will be able to apply it to the rest of the site and I will be able to administer it successfully.

The question is:
Can I do all this with XOOPS ? Do I need to use any particular modules ?

Thank you for reading my post

Sounds like you may be interested in looking into either the mx-directory module (which is still a beta), or the upcoming efqDirectory.

This forum thread touches on comparisons between the two modules. There are also at least 3 more forum threads on this site.

You can find related threads here: https://xoops.org/search.php?query=mxDirectory&mid=7&action=showall&andor=AND&start=0

There is a module currently known as Xdirectory. It's a good module, but I don't think it will provide everything you need.

You can test out the Xdirectory module on the XOOPS Module Testing Site. They have it listed under "Yellow Pages." It's a great site that allows you to demo modules from both an administrator's & end-user's point of view.

None of these modules will provide requsted flexibility - all records in all categories have same structure of data, but, AFAIS, different types of listing must have different
- data
- style of presentantion
Also "a image gallery for each hotel , category or listing" is a big trouble, which can be only partially solved by using any from many image galleries

Resume: task can be hardly solved on the basis of existing modules...

Lazybadger, great name! But in my experience, badgers are some tough critters.

Maybe I'm not reading it properly, but according to this post by the developer of the upcoming efqDirectory, some of the desired goals might be accomplished.

I doubt if the drop-down menu can be achieved too easily, but isn't there the possiblility to create a self-updating block that will display listings from a specific category (recent listings)? (it might get kind of unwieldy though with a hundred listings in the category)

You're definitely right about the photo album aspect of Sunny's objectives. A good coder could probably come up with a way to tie the databases together, but...

Been toying around with the Real Estate module for the last two days. Wonder if that would work or could be adapted...

Even though I expect a major delay for the efqDirectory module, it should cover all your requirements....except for the drop down box. Also the image 'galley' will be added at some point.

Judging from the scheduled projects for my study I do not expect to have this module ready this year. But perhaps you can start with mxDirectory when it is ready for a stable release.

But some day it will be there. I am running a travel related site as well and so I need this module for my own purposes too .

Best wishes