Getting ready

The Ditto Package comes bundled with Evolution. Make sure you have a working site to proceed. Create a collection of documents or pages if you don’t already have some.

How to do it...

1. Call Ditto by passing the snippet and the parameters you require. In this example call we have passed values to extend the data returned from the child element of document ID 38, wrap the snippet returned data in a tpl chunk, sort returned results in ascending order, and truncate the text:

[!Ditto? &parents=`38`&extenders=`summary` &tpl=`tplBlog` &orderBy=`createdon ASC` &truncText=`Continue Reading This Article `!]

2. Pass the arguments you require to generate the desired results. Ditto will return collections of results from documents and can be used for photo galleries, blog listings, catalogs, and anything where you need to return lists and groups of documents.

-create a Chunk Element for your tpl and insert placeholders

How it works...

The Ditto Module will take the Resources you specify, and display them aggregated within a page or section. These are often short excerpts with thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and links to read more about the story. This is understood by some in the industry as blog-style pages, and this module does this job very well. Although Wayfinder was created to dynamically generate site navigations, we can also use this snippet to aggregate data from Resources and Elements. Other packages useful for this kind of utility include getField and getResources.

There's more...

Working with the code in Recipe #4, the Chromeless Youtube Player, we can create a dynamic video blog-style page with some quick changes to our Ditto snippet. Obtain your YouTube embed code and insert that in your Resource Summary.

Create a Chunk Element and insert some placeholders. Use Ditto to point to your Chunk, we'll call it tplBlog. Now we can access when we include Ditto onto the page, with the required code. In order to get the Summary to show in our listing, we will use the 'extenders' argument in our Ditto call. Make sure to insert a space between each argument to use as a delimiter and the question mark is required. The Rich-text-editor will alter the markup, editing the source code directly makes it easier to see the spaces. If you have omitted a space your code will not work, and there is no error checking system.

[!Ditto? &`tplBlog`&extenders=`summary` !]

Example Ditto call with other arguments used:

[!Ditto? &parents=`5`&extenders=`summary`&tpl=`tplBlog`&orderBy=`createdon ASC`&display=`6`&truncText=`Continue Reading This Article` &dateFormat=`%e %B %Y`!]

In our tpl Chunk we will include the placeholders and required code.

<h3><a href=[+url+]>[+title+]</a></h3>

<p>[+summary+]</p>