Question about categories and subcategories design dropping sections

[madelman]

I am a user of Joomla and searching for a solution in one of the problems I currently have designing a multilingual site  I found Elxis, which caught my attention after using the demo site. Being a CMS actively  developed I thought my problem was resolved here with Elxis.

This is the issue: I have a web site based on news, where I have to use different sections, different sources and different authors for articles. I am currently using Joomla 1.5, which allows me to have sections to manage 7 different menus and within those menus different sources are published. So for example:

Section       Categories (Or Sources)
US News   
                 Source1
                 Source2
                 Source3
EUR News
                 SourceA
                 Source1
                 SourceN

So this kind of design is solved with Sections and Categories. I have about 1500 different categories or in my logic sources, distributed in all the Sections. When any user submits a new article from the front-end, they select the section drop-down field and categories are listed in the category drop-down list.

I saw the Elxis in the demo still supports this format and now that I downloaded the newer version 4.1, it is now using only categories as Joomla does, which is a problem for me now.

Just think about 1500 categories or in my case sources, which can be included in 2 or more sections with the same name. If an end-user needs to select Source1 in my example among other 1498 subcategories, it would be easy to miss the right subcategory and select the wrong one under the main category. So it is a nightmare for an end-user. With Joomla and its multilingual system is worse.

I am not sure if my problem is described properly so you can understand the issue and I would like to understand the reason to change sections and categories for the categories and subcategories. It is easier for end-users to have 2 drop-down lists and based on the section selection the only sources or categories are listed instead a bunch of categories and subcategories that won't understand.

This design of categories and subcategories works when you have like 20 categories in total , but when you have 1500 total, is too complicated in a small drop-down list.

[madelman]

well. elxis looked like a good solution for my problem but made the same bad design as Joomla, so I rather still trying to figure out how to handle this change (removing sections for categories and subcategories)  in Joomla or looking for another CMs that allows to select a section and display only the categories related to that instead a bunch of data for the end-users. 

[datahell]

you have taken this all wrong. section > category is exactly like category > subcategory

. in fact now you much better control over the layout and style. The sections method is too restraining.