Content lists are a great way to organize and display groups of content. They work through the use of content labels and can be heavily filtered to display specific content. There are many reasons to use content lists, so before you start labeling pages and building your list, think about what kind of content you want to display and why you want to display it. Here are some ideas to inspire you:
- Upcoming events for a particular venue
- Specific events or news listings so you don't have to replicate pages
- Further information pages that appear after form submissions
- Library display pages, detailing things like Top Ten lists or Coming Soon lists
Upcoming events for a particular venue
The OC Venue content type provides a space to showcase all the wonderful aspects of your venues, including what the venue is for and what features it has. With content lists, you can also set your venue pages to display all the events happening at those venues.
Onkaparinga, South Australia, has used this on a number of their venue pages. To take one example: Onkaparinga has used a content label on the events which are happening at their Arts Centre and created a content list on the Arts Centre venue page which gathers and presents these events. With this solution, every new event created with this label will automatically be added to the list.
Specific events or news listings
Content lists can also be used to create highly specific news or events listings. Listings using the OC Module Interface content type list all pages of a particular content type. For example, the module interface with a news template will list all OC News Articles created on the site. While they can be filtered by category on the listing, they can't list only some news pages.
Weld County, Colorado, has used a content list to present OC News Articles related to their Health and Environment Department. News articles will automatically be pulled into and listed on any OC Module Interface with a news template. By creating this content list, and including content in it from their entire site tree, they can ensure that any news articles created under their news listing and labeled correctly will also appear on their Health and Environment News Releases page.
To take another example: you can use a content list filtered by content labels and content types to list, for example, events relating to seniors on a designated page. Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, has used this option on their 'Over 55s program' page, which contains information about the program and a list of upcoming events for people aged over 55.
Further information pages
Content lists can be used to direct your community to further browsing. If you're using OpenForms, when you create a form, you can assign an OpenCities page to redirect a user to once they have submitted the form.
For example, most cities and councils will have an animal registration form. If you are using OpenForms to create this, you can add a redirect link to direct the user to an OC General page with related information upon form submissions. You would first need to add a content label to any relevant pages and create a page with a content list. On this page, you could list pages on the site to do with animals, such as pet-friendly parks or pet-related events.
As you can see, Point Russell has chosen to redirect a form submission to a page with 2 different content lists; one that lists pet-friendly events and one which lists pet-friendly parks. Watch the video below for more details on how to do this.
Library display pages
While most cities and councils have an external library service, which contains a full catalog and other online services, you may have a subsite or section of your site about your libraries. Information about the library can be presented here, including different services, events, and branches, but you may wish to use content lists to add a few final touches.
For example, Onkaparinga, South Australia, has used content lists to create different book lists. Their main library page has been split into sections and contains 3 content lists: a 'Coming soon' list, a 'Top 10 adult fiction' list, and a 'Top 10 adult non-fiction' list. These 3 lists require 3 different content labels which can be applied to pages for each book on the lists.
