Is ExpressionEngine capable of handling HABTM (has and belongs to many) relationships, even if it's with a plugin?
Basically, I have two channels: recipes and ingredients. A user needs to be able to create a recipe by assigning entries from my Ingredients channel, but when adding an ingredient they also need to specify additional data such as quantity. Is this possible?
Your answer lies in two indispensable EE add-ons by Pixel and Tonic: Playa and Matrix.
Playa is a many-to-many relationship fieldtype and module.
Matrix is a fieldtype which allows a single field to contain multiple rows of multiple predefined columns of data, each column of which can be a different fieldtype (including Playa).
So in your case, you'd have your standard Ingredients channel, then in your Recipes channel, you'd have an Ingredients field, which would be a Matrix fieldtype. In your Matrix field, you'd have one Playa column which displayed a dropdown of entries from your Ingredients channel, and another column that was a simple text input set to Integer for the quantity.
