Newbie Questions -- Views vs Menus vs Filters....Help!

[alleghator]

I love the Phoenix functionality and powerful tools, but I'm not a programmer and have no idea how to code (or what file to edit) to get the UI just the way I want it.

I don't know if I'm really dealing with menus, views, filters ... or some combination of them.

I have my imported/archived media stored in folders according to audience and purpose. From the top down ... Movies, Archived TV and Family Movies. Movies has 3 sub-folders: Fitness, Kids and Not Kids. Archived TV has Kids and Not Kids, and Family Movies has Home Movies, Performances and Trips.

Ideally I'd like to implement a similar structure in my Phoenix UI. Can I divide the Archived TV menu item (under TV) into two sub-items and have each of them point to one of my two sub-folders? Can I divide the Videos menu into my three custom sub-menus? And how do I get the Home Movies under Memories to point to my folder, and is it possible to further split into the three sub-folders?

Thanks for your help,
--Heidi Dugan

[wrems]

You'll be dealing with a combination of views (VFS) and menus. Inside the views you can filter, sort group etc to align the contents as you wish.

I don't think one needs to be a programmer to do what you want to do. Once you get the general gist of how these components all work together it's not too bad. I'd take it one small step at a time. There's quite a few people here to help.

There are quite a number of examples in the threads too. Search for VFS examples. Not sure how helpful this really is but I put together a 2 part video http://www.youtube.com/user/Tutorial.../0/0kJSPTuFeeI on getting started. It might help you answer some questions...

Feel free to hit me up with a PM if you want. I could try to help you construct some of what you're talking about time permitting

[bialio]

You will probably want to use a view that is tied to your folder structure - rather than the virtual folders that Phoenix uses by default. You'll have to work at it a bit to get there, but once it's there you should be in good shape.

So basically, at a high level, you will want 3 views - one that points at your movies folder, one that points at your Archived TV, and one that points at Family Movies. Getting the views set up is the first step.

2nd step is to integrate them into the Landing Zone so that you have ez shortcuts to get there.

There are some threads - maybe "VFS Examples" would a good one to look at on how to get a view that points at a directory.
btl.

[alleghator]

Hello all. This is the OP's Tech Support (hubby).

We (wife and I) need more info to implement these examples. We just don't know how to set up.... anything. We are pretty computer savvy, but don't know how to use ANY of this code.

How does it fit in with anything else?
What else is needed?

I need some general overview of how everything fits together. Or, well, I'll have NO idea what we need create.

Wife says "Or someone(wonderful) could just write all this for us". Yeah. I know. Not gonna happen. Besides, I'd like to figure it out so we could add on to it as we need to.

Anyway, hope someone can point me in the right direction.

[stuckless]

I'd start with this post on editing menus. And just play around and add/modify some menus to just a feel for what you need to do. Now, for some things, like just hiding a menu, you can do that in the Menu Editor in the Phoenix UI. So for example, if you wanted to create a Home Movies menu item to replace the Memories menu item, you can hide the Memories item and then just add a new menu item called Home Movies and insert it at that location. (again, just play with the menus for a bit doing some really simple stuff)

Once you move past that, you can then move into the VFS (ie, the Views). There is a sticky on editing views, and it has some examples of things that other people have done as well. Again, start small, and build on it.

Once you master editing menus and editing views, then you'll find lots of examples in our menus (or other people's samples) where you attach a view to menu.

You can pretty much do anything in views... ie, you can create a View that includes other views as child folders... or you can create a view that is "rooted" at a given child path within the view (ie, a view that multiple child folders, but you want to the start the view at a given child folder and not at the main root), etc.