I have a section of my site called 'Events' where I have child pages called 'Article' with a Date field. I am trying to set up a "Next Event" section on the homepage which will pick out the next event by date (there may be 10 events coming up but I need to select the closest one).

I have been trying to write a function in the Homepage Controller to pick out the next event but I cannot work out how to select properties of the child pages such as Title or Date. The code I have so far is

 class Homepage_Controller extends Page_Controller {
    public function nextEvent(){
        $children = $this->ChildrenOf('Events');
        $event = "";

       //Code to select next event

        return $event;
    }
} 

I've been searching around for a long time but cannot find a similar example anywhere, could anyone point me in the right direction?

Many thanks,
Adam.

you should be able to filter $children directly to find the next event. Supposing you are at v3.1.x, something like

$next = $this->ChildrenOf('Events')
        ->filter(array('Date:GreaterThan' => $currentDate))
        ->sort('Date')
        ->first();

Thanks martimiz! I got that to work :)