I've been updating my old html-based website into Movable Type, with great results so far, even though I had no prior experience with MT, php, or shtml. It has been easy because of all the great tutorials and feedback given by other MT users on the web.

I've come to a point in the design where I'm a bit stuck. I've got movie reviews, lots of them, and have created a number of categories for them. (Year, Country, Genre). I would also like users to be able to sort by Director, as well.

But after thinking about it for a while, having what would eventually be 300+ director names as categories would be impossible to manage and probably way too large to handle. So how else to create a page that lists all films by one director, without creating categories?

I then thought to use the "Keywords" field specifically to enter the Director of the film as a key value. Then, I can call the field to print the director's name in an entry like this:



Then, I thought I could wrap the Director's name with a hyperlink that goes to a search for the director's name. But I would need to first convert the name to search format (that is, director "Stephen Spielberg" would become "Stephen+Spielberg"). There doesn't appear to be a way to do this (sort of a "dirify" but to convert to a search string). Instead, I could create another key in the Keywords field called "Search Description" and manually enter "Stephen+Spielberg" in it. Then, a search would look something like:



To make sure I was only finding movies directed by this director, and not just mentions of his name, I would use the "Limiting Search to Specific Fields" hack and have the search only check the Keywords field (the URL above would have to be modified appropriately).

OK. So, that's the solution I came up with...but is it the right one? Is there some other way to create pages based on individual directors, without creating categories, that I missed, perhaps using php? Is this a lousy approach because of server strain? And is there a way to "searchify" text to make it appear like a search string? I would greatly appreciate any thoughts the members of this forum might wish to share.

If you would like to get a better idea of what I am describing, the site is at http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/cinema, though still incomplete. It is comprised of two blogs, an article blog and a review blog, that send some related info to each other for sidebars.

Thanks much,

-- Peter