I used the finsweet pagination plug-in to paginate a CMS collection which contains a list of items, which are basically a long list of bands classified from A to Z. Each item is a list of bands beginning with a specific letter (item 1=A, item 2=B, item 3 =C, etc…)
I managed to paginate that in 26 different pages (one for each letter), but the pagination shows up, of course, with numbers.
I’m looking for a way to show up letters instead of the numbers. The only other option I can think of is making 26 different non-dynamic pages by hand, and manually link them, but for some reason it seems laborious and not very satisfying.
Pagination in the traditional sense isn’t designed for organizing data categorically. I think you probably want a different approach.
OPTION 1 - COLLECTION PAGES AS LETTER GROUPS
The simplest one is to add a grouping indicator to each CMS item, a 1 letter alpha. A, B, C, etc. Then build an A-Z bar, which links to e.g. /letter/a. Each group of bands gets published to a separate grouping page. Functionally this would give you the same result as typical pagination but without the benefit of FS Load pre-loading that data.
OPTION 2 - FS LOAD + FS FILTER
Create a single letter grouping indicator as in #1 above in the CMS, then setup FS Load and FS Filter. The filter bar would be 26 radio button letters, each filtering to show only the items in that one letter grouping.
OPTION 3 - TABS
SA5 Layout can dynamically generate tabs from a data source, and group things into them as well. This would allow you to create 26 tabs, which contain CMS-sourced content neatly sorted into each tab. You could create the 26 tabs manually if you want, or gen them from a separate 26-item A-Z collection list. Then SA5 Layout would sort your items into them.
Thanks a lot for this fast and precise answer!
However I’m not sure I understand what you mean in the first two options. Do you mean creating 26 collections? and then link them through a reference field? that seems like a lot of Collections, is that really the idea or did I misunderstand? Could you please expand your answer, thanks a lot
Two collections only. One collection for your Bands, one collection for Groups which contains your A-Z letters. The single ref from Bands to Groups is what organizes the bands into A-Z groupings.
