A New Way to Browse Opus: Collections
Back in June, Opus passed a pretty significant milestone when I published the site’s 8000th post, a reflection on Psalm 19, arguably my favorite chapter in the Bible. Assuming I can maintain my current publication rate, which is just over 40 posts/month, I should hit 9,000 posts around this time in 2027. Ultimately, I’d love for Opus to reach 10,000+ posts.
But 8,000 posts is nothing to sneeze at, and it got me thinking about the sheer amount of content that’s contained on Opus, and how difficult it can be to find stuff. Currently, you can browse the site’s archives by topic, tag, genre, etc., and even browse my hand-picked list of the site’s best posts. But I couldn’t help wondering about other ways to organize and highlight Opus’ content.
To that end, I’ve added a new feature called collections, which are groups of posts organized by niche or subject matter. Which means that you can finally see all of my Chuck Norris movie reviews in one spot.
On the backend, this was pretty easy to do thanks to Craft’s incredible content modeling capabilities. Basically, I created a new section called “Collections” with its own fieldset, into which I added all of my collections. Then, I added a new “Entries” fieldtype to the existing forms for adding/editing posts, reviews, and other entries. This allowed me to connect individual entries to one or more collections.
On the frontend, I copied one of my existing archive templates, and just updated it to look for connection-based relationships. The only downside to this is that the main “Collections” page has the same layout as all of my other archive pages. Which isn’t ugly by any means, but I think I might want to switch up that page’s layout a bit in the coming weeks.
All in all, it took me about an hour to do everything: building out the new “Collections” section, connecting individual entries to their collections, and coding the front-end templates. I’m pretty pleased with how it all came together, and I hope it makes Opus a little easier to navigate.