Today we’d like to introduce you to one of our favorite old-but-new add-ons, Hop Introvert.
Many ExpressionEngine users know and love the ExpressionEngine “Relationships” field, which creates connections between entries. For news publishers, Relationship fields are a great way to produce lists of related stories. Relationships can be used to built connections between all kinds of content—ingredients of a recipe, albums by an artist, concerts at a park, and so on.
The Relationships field
However, the current field is sort of like one-way glass mirrors—it’s easy to see what entries you’ve chosen in a Relationships field, of course, but hard to see what other entries might be pointing to the one you have open for editing. Here, for instance, is a Relationships field in use on the Hop Studios website, connecting a project we did for Eye Carumba with a blog post where we, um, brag about it. In Relationships field terminology, the project entry is the “parent” of the “child” blog post.
So that’s all well and good. But what the Relationships field doesn’t do natively, is let you open the “child” post and see that it is related to a “parent” entry. Hop Introvert fills exactly that use-case gap.
The Hop Introvert field in use
In this instance, we set up the Hop Introvert field in the blog channel. Once the “child” blog post is opened, we can easily see which “parent” project entry used a Relationships field to connect to this one.
And the fun doesn’t stop there! Hop Introvert can sort the entries it displays by title, channel, entry date, and status. Moreover, you can click the entry title in the Hop Introvert field to open those parent entries for further sleuthing and quick updating.
You can use Hop Introvert with plain Relationships field, Relationships in Grid fields, Playa fields, and Playa in Matrix fields. (We didn’t do Playa in Grid fields or anything in a Fluid Field because we didn’t want to write code no one needs yet… but if you ask, we’ll add it.)
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