Problem with categories and structure module - Expressionengine

I’m currently working on a travel site for a client of mine, they require a cms so that they can add hotels and destinations and also update their website with ease.

The basic structure of the site is explained below:

1. Home page
This page currently pulls out destination information and a section of hotels that change on the refresh of the page.

2. Destination listing page one
  This page will show the countries in this specific destination so for example: if the destination is the Caribbean it’ll list out the countries that my client sells hotels for, sorted by rating so if a hotel is rated 5 stars it’ll appear near the top of the listings. The countries are setup as categories and are unique to the listing pages, the categories contain a brief description of that country and an image that will link to the hotel list page displaying the hotels in that country.

    2b. Hotel list
      This page will contain the list of hotels that are on sale in the specific country.

      2c. Hotel description page
        This page contains pictures and information about the selected hotel. 

3. Destination listing page two

    3b. Hotel list

        3c. Hotel description page

This section has the same concept as the first destination listing section above except the information is unique to its destination. (obviously)

So first things first, I’m having a few issues with how the functionality of the cms works, at the moment to add a hotel my client has to fill out one big form (they like this because it means they don’t have to move around the cms too much). I’ve created two weblogs for each destination but the fields are the same.

In order to add a hotel to a specific country you have to assign it using categories. Now the problem I’m having here is that if I want to make a hotel appear in more than one country it displays both country names, images and descriptions and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on, I thought of using some sort of tagging system because I thought this might be more appropriate to what I need to do?

Secondly I’ve downloaded and installed the structure module as I thought this would be good to help my client visually see how the site is structured (excuse the pun) and make adding hotels and other pages and content even easier than it already is and not only that but to have an automatically updated menu and sitemap. I’ve read through the documentation and I’ve tried experimenting with a few of its features - such as the listings feature. I thought this maybe a better way to list and organize my countries instead of using categories or tags but would this work or would it make things so much harder to maintain and keep track of? Because currently if my client wants to edit a certain hotel they just select it from the edit menu and change all of the information in that one post, would by using the structure method make it more awkward?

I from what I can see, the structure module works by treating weblog posts as ‘pages’ now with this in mind if I wanted to use structure how would I get it to work in the way that I want it to, in terms of having a weblog with one big field g开发者_如何学Croup so that when a hotel is added all of its information is in one place instead of being spread across 3 different weblogs?

RIGHT, I hope I’ve not confused you here.. If you need any more information just holla at me!

Thanks

Make a weblog for the hotels, then use the Playa module to relate the hotels to the Structure pages. (I know this answer is a bit late, the site is probably long finished...)