I am putting together a small site for a friend who publishes a newsletter for villa owners. I've got the design and navigation worked out, but don't know if Drupal is customizable enough to do this?
The navigation looks like:
Home
Latest News
Our Newsletter
- Past Issues
- Subscribe
Resources
- Tax issues
- Tax calculator
- Discount Tickets
- Buying a HomeSome of the pages (such as the tax calculator) will contain PHP or Javascript content. Past issues will contain a list of files; latest news a listing of the latest items categorized as news (doh!).
Other pages in that menu will be for subscribers only, but she'd like the entry to stay in the menu and a 'You must subscribe to view this page' message be shown when a non-subscriber clicks on it.
This gives you a good idea of how the site should behave. Here's a few more specific questions from a quick play with Drupal:
- Is there any way to show all posts to the 'News' category on one page (or rather, paginate it, so only X show per page)?
- The front page of the site is supposed to have static text at the top of the page explaining the site, and 2-3 'Latest News' headlines with synopsis underneath. Again, having played with Drupal I can't find a way to do this - is it possible?
- On a similar note, is it possible to show the headlines and teaser to non-subscribers, but have the full article only visible for subscribers?
- I think I can have a list of files on one page - is that correct? My friend wants to upload the old issues of the newsletter and put them on the website.
- When I played with Drupal a while ago, I found a way to alias nodes to another url - eg mysite/news points to mysite/node/3. Now, playing with 4.5, I cannot see this. Can someone tell me if it's hidden away or not ready until the official release?
The other complicator is that my friend is not exactly computer literate (although she can use Word and a little of FrontPage). I'm thinking of using the htmlarea module to make editing content easier, but is there any way to make custom admin pages to make life easier for her?
OK, I think that is a fair summary. The two questions that really need answering are:
- Can Drupal do this? [and do it easily, without writing custom modules]
- Is Drupal the best solution or is there an alternative?
I have been looking at other solutions; one is to make it a static HTML site but then I still have to write the file upload, news and subscriber features.
Thoughts, comments, feedback and suggestions all much appreciated!
Comments
Works for me
Drupal works well as a CMS for a small site that has admins that aren't extremely technical minded.
You can use php code in your pages (nodes) and customize menus to suit your needs.
As far as formatting your content, you have a few choices. Let the manager(s) of the site submit plain text and use css for formatting, or as you mentioned, use htmlarea. I have used both. Some of my users like htmlarea and others like to post plain text and let my code handle the formatting.
From my point of view (i still admin and support the site), I like letting css handle the formatting of content. The look and feel of the site stays consistent, no matter what users post.
I wouldn't worry about creating custom admin pages for your site managers, Drupals' admin interface is really quite good and can be made to be very simple.
For example, I configured my site managers permissions to have full site control. She logs on, browses to the page she wishes to edit and clicks "Edit", makes her changes and clicks Submit. To add a page, she clicks "create content". It's really that simple.
The site is http://www.sanilaccountyva.org if you'd like to visit. If you would like to poke around in the admin menu, let me know and I'll set up an account for you, with restricted access of course, but you'll get a taste of what using Drupal is like :-)
Annie
Annie
Your questions
Ok, I have a little more time this evening so I will try to give you specific answers to your questions.
Is there any way to show all posts to the 'News' category on one page (or rather, paginate it, so only X show per page)?
Annie: Drupals (4.5) aggregator does this for you if you're talking about RSS feeds. In administer/aggregator you can set how many 'headlines' are to appear per page. If you're talking about postings to forums, under administer/settings/forums you can also set how many topics appear per page.
The front page of the site is supposed to have static text at the top of the page explaining the site, and 2-3 'Latest News' headlines with synopsis underneath. Again, having played with Drupal I can't find a way to do this - is it possible?
Annie: Yes, you can have static content on the 'front page' by checking the box "promote to front page" upon node creation. I'm not sure exactly how to include RSS news headlines on the front page, but would think a little php could accomplish this -- I'll have to work on this one as I am just learning the guts of Drupal and what can be done with it myself.
I would hazard a 'yes' answer to this question because you can put RSS feeds inside a block.......so if you can put them in a block, you should be able to have them display in other places as well.
If by Latest News, you mean news you or others post as nodes or forum topics, you can easily add them, along with a short description, to the front page by promoting them upon creation.
On a similar note, is it possible to show the headlines and teaser to non-subscribers, but have the full article only visible for subscribers?
Annie: This one I'm not sure about. Someone who knows more about the permissions system can probably answer this for you, sorry.
I'll try to answer any other questions you have.
Annie
Annie
Show the headlines and teaser to non-subscribers
Yes, you can do this but there's a quite programming involve. I think right now this is not configurable through setting permissions (Drupal 4.4).
I would like to help you to get you started..
jeff_vicedo@yahoo.com
jhefmv [at] gmail [dot] com
Work smarter, not harder!
Thanks Jeff!
Thanks for your kind offer of help. I'm going to talk my friend out of this feature for the time being, but when I have a bit more free time I'll certainly take you up on the offer :-)
Peter
Drupal 4.5
Since you are just on design/concept stage, why don't you just wait for the official release of 4.5 version and have it installed there the node level permission module? Though this is a contrib module, I found it good and most of my needs are there.
Work smarter, not harder!
jeff_vicedo@yahoo.com
jhefmv [at] gmail [dot] com
Work smarter, not harder!
Hi Annie, Thanks for all y
Hi Annie,
Thanks for all your help so far!
Just to clarify a few points...
I was thinking of stories posted to a News category, and wanted to show
all the items of this category on one page. Something I haven't figured out
how to do so far in Drupal :-)
Yes, that's what I was meaning, but can they disappear after a certain length
of time? Here's my mockup
design, how I want the front page of the site to look if possible.
I'm also trying to get new pages created to have the option of appearing
in the menu automatically, rather than having to be linked to by hand. Again,
is this possible, or for what I need should I keep on adding them by hand?
I realise I can't make some of the menu links bold whatever happens.
Thanks!
Peter
Hi Peter, Yes, that's what
Hi Peter,
If you set them to be static and promoted to the front page, they should not disappear ever. I don't *think* you are limited in the number of items you can display on the front page.
Regarding the menus, you can create a taxonomy vocabulary called "News" and then add terms to classify your news items to it. Such as:
News (vocabulary)
****Local News (term)
****Regional News (term)
and so on
Then add the vocabulary News to the menu.
When you create news items, assign them to the proper taxonomy category, ie News>>Local News, and they should automatically appear in the menu, without haveing to manually add them.
Unfortunately, the current Drupal doesn't offer much support for always expanded menu items, so I'm not sure if you could easily make the items appear like your mock up shows. Mock up is very nice, btw, good job!
See these posts for discussion of expanding menus.
Making some menu items bold and not others should be accomplished via one of the css style sheets, either drupal.css and/or your customized theme css.
Annie
Annie
Answers to some points
2. The front page of the site is supposed to have static text at the top of the page explaining the site, and 2-3 'Latest News' headlines with synopsis underneath. Again, having played with Drupal I can't find a way to do this - is it possible?
I think you can do that with the mission statement or slogan settings, but it depends on the theme you are using. Under 4.5.x, these are configurable on a per theme basis.
4. I think I can have a list of files on one page - is that correct? My friend wants to upload the old issues of the newsletter and put them on the website.
I don't see a reason why you can't. You can have one big page (node) called 'Old issues' or 'Archive' and it just contains the links to the old issues (are you using PDF?). Or you can upload them all and enter a node for each one saying 'Jan 2000 issue', 'Feb 2000 issue', ...etc.
5. When I played with Drupal a while ago, I found a way to alias nodes to another url - eg mysite/news points to mysite/node/3. Now, playing with 4.5, I cannot see this. Can someone tell me if it's hidden away or not ready until the official release?
The option is still there. You have to enable the path module, and then every node you add will prompt you for a 'path alias'. You can add a url alias to any node at any time from the admin menus.
--
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc.
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Files associated with a node?
With regards to the files for download on the website, is there any way
with Drupal to assign the uploaded files to a node, so it automatically generates
a page with all the files for download from this node? I've got FSCache and
filesystem2 installed; and was hoping that my friend would only have to upload
the files, not create a link to them as well.
Thanks for reminding me about the path module - I'm starting to use that
on the site now.
Peter
The attachment module?
Think I've just answered my own question in the form of the attachment module :-)
But perhaps someone can confirm this is the case?
How do you protect nodes in Drupal 4.5?
From my reading of the new features I think this is possible (to have some nodes only visible to authenticated users)? If so, where is the option hidden, or is there a module that handles this? I've been searching this site and have found much discussion of groups/permissions, but nothing saying "this is the module to use".
Peter
see here: The capability is
see here:
The capability is there but no management module has been fully developed to exploit the feature.
See this post for links
http://drupal.org/node/11158#comment-17115
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain