I am currently available for hire. See original post for details, private message me for a quote.

I am currently available for hire! Private message me with details about your project.

thanks

I am the developer of the addons you are looking at.

With any application, one principle is to separate functionality from presentation. Themes are for presentation, so to move your site to c5 you can mentally separate the project into 2 parts. A theme - what it looks like, and functionality - what it does. With that separation you can then swap a theme while preserving functionality, or change functionality while keeping a theme.

Ignoring 'theme' for now, the addons you mention are aimed at functionality.

The usual way of creating an index such as yours in c5 is a page for each film and then a 'page list' to index them. There are some good AJAX page list addons that could facilitate dynamic filtering.

Pages in c5 don't consume a lot of space, so using a page as a data item is a common practice. Such pages can be set up directly, usually with a 'page type' providing your common structure, or from the dashboard using 'composer'. An addon that helps with such is 'Best Suite - Core'. Its not easy for a beginner to set up, but could be used to provide a management interface.

Once you have all your pages set up (one per movie), a UCP block on the page could be used to pull in (and cache) movie data from the film sites you use as sources (with the provision that it needs to be static text - UCP will not pull javascript or css from those pages). Blocks by AJAX would enable that to be filled asynchronously from the containing page. It may help with perceived response time, but may not be necessary.

To schedule updates, UCP has a built in cache. So you could run the 'Cache Vac' addon job at a regular time and the various pages would re-fill their cached data next time they were accessed.

Magic Data provides a way to retrieve and interact with data already in a c5 site. In your context, you could use a stack to provide further templating of page content, adapting what is shown according to page (movie) attributes retrieved with Magic Data. However, you would need to create and update those page attributes with the remote information.

If you already have a table of film data, perhaps a spreadsheet that you upload, the usual custom development for c5 would be a 'single page' that shows items from your table. Within that, you could use blocks or stacks containing Magic Data to simplify the amount of php required. But such a single page would require some custom development.

Another approach would be a one-off php script as a c5 job or task to loop through your table or spreadsheet to create the entire suite of regular pages with all attributes etc in place. You would then maintain that by adding pages through the usual c5 dialogs.

If using Magic Data, you could also write some php custom symbols to enable Magic Data to read the remote movie data directly in a similar way to if it were attributes within c5. Thus removing some of the need to populate attributes with the remote data.

An addon I am about to submit for review is a Magic Data powered list, where Magic Data is used to both generate the list and show each list item, using a c5 stack as an item template. This would provide another option for your solution.

Overall, the addons can be used in a variety of ways to help do what you want, but there would still be a lot of work involved, either manually creating pages, or writing php to do so.

Your project is not what anyone would consider an 'easy first project' in c5. So before making any decisions, I recommend you create one or more test sites and play with some ideas using free addons and especially page lists. Have a look at how a blog is set up in c5. Its not your application, but the architecture could be similar. Try different approaches and be prepared to junk them and start again. Then think about where the paid addons fit into those approaches or make them easier to implement for your real project.

Something seems to have one wrong here (other than hijacking @growthcurves thread).

@DeafAccessFilms - your original question/post above has disappeared. That leaves my answer out of context for anyone following. Then your post immediately above is currently empty, again leaving everything out of context. If you still have the question, it would help others and avoid much confusion if you edited it back in.

Nice response John.

Just a note, but I didn't receive *your first* reply by email, but did for the following ones. Something funky is going on here...

The original post by @DeafAccessFilms is missing for now.

To summarise and put my posts in context, the post by @DeafAccessFilms (http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/jobs1/custom-theme-develo... ) was asking whether my addons Universal Content Puller and Magic Data could be used, in conjunction with a theme ported to concrete5, to replicate or replace an existing (non c5) site. Hence my response.