Thinking out loud.

Good morning the people of Drupal community from here in the sunny UK.

I ve been looking at Drupal for the last 2 weeks or so now and am loving it- its a good code.

Anyhow I ve been really busy reading about these boards and this and that getting a feel for what this can do. Impressed so far. I can pretty much do all the stuff I need for the small review site I wanted to set up to post my streams of conciousness about italian cinema. So I m sorted.

But my friend has presented a different problem and I think it could be answered with drupal, though I m not sure this one could be solved without hacking the core.

My friend wanted to create a sort of communty run comminity where people could talk about anything they liked- this is not to be the new myspace or whatever but just to serve the existing community that ticks over with about 600 members or so.

Anyhow for my site I was playing about with a lovely little movie database module (that I am going to slightly modify to make it a movie review/database) anyhow this feature is great- you put in the name of the actor and it links to a page (node?) which holds the entire filmography of that person, so each time you add a film to the database it creates a new "person page". And to this page you can hang comments off it,

So lets think about this for a second- what if the movie cast field was not that at all but a field where you could list your hobbies- then this would be creating a hobby page (with comments threaded forum).

That would in effect answer my friends problem- a person could talk about anything because the number of forums would be limited solely by the imagination of the members and whatever they list as their hobbies would produce a forum.

Great eh?

But no there is a flaw with all this- a movie review module amended to be a hobbies module is really easy, change a couple of words here or there and bobs yer uncle, but its not great- this stuff really belongs in the profile. Hobbies and interests belongs in the profile.

So this really means that this approach is doomed from the outset. But there must be other ways.

Put simply if I wanted a field in a profile (I think there is a custom profile mod) that could list hobbies and interests of user this would be easy enough. But for each of these hobbies and interests to link to a node off which a comments forum could be hung- is that doable? Is that already a function that could be done?

So if I put sheep shearing as a hobby then there would be a sheep shearing page created and if someone else speciifies the same hobby then their profile also links to same page.

Then only quick way I could think of to do all this is to heavily mod the movie db since the functionality is in there but other than that I dont know enough about drupal (I m going to be ordering the drupal books from amazon this week when I get paid) to envisage other solutions.

This is just whats on my mind at the moment- if I cant find a solution to this then never mind, I offered to look into this for a friend I didnt make any firm commitments to coming up with a solution :D

My php skills are not great but thats mostly a syntax issue rather than a structure thing but I can follow scripts and get a fair idea whats going on, but this drupal is very new to me so maybe what I need is already out there and others here may know the answer.

Anyhow, as usual I have gone on too long so I ll stop now. I m loving Drupal btw and the more time I spend looking at it the more I like what I see, look out for my site in the showcase section in the coming months for great reviews of Italian exploitation cinema of the 70's and 80s all built on Drupal

take care,
ox.