By shipal on

Hi all,

A newbie here, been using Joomla and just started using Drupal. Losing my mind here trying to figure out what each module does (would be nice if there were screenshots and demo :) ).

Anyway I would like to have a "The Onion"-like front page, which is a lot of blocks each showing contents (nodes?) from one or more terms. I tried the front page module and views modules and I just can't figure out how they work.

Could anyone recommend some modules for me? Thanks in advance for your help ! :)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

geojaz’s picture

geojaz commented

The basic unit in which Drupal displays different content is called Blocks... You can access them in admin>>site building>>blocks. (D5)

Many modules create blocks that can be activated and positioned in different places on your pages.

As I'm sure you've figured out by now, front page and views are not what you're looking for ;) If you're looking to link to various news sources (fake or real) you can try starting off by creating aggregator blocks. Aggregator is a built in module that aggregates RSS and other data feeds into blocks on your Drupal pages.

Hope that helps. Which content were you looking to replicate, specifically?

shipal’s picture

shipal commented

Hi geojaz,

Thanks for your message. Yes I'd like to have all those blocks on my front page so that I can group contents (nodes) together by tags.

For example, block 1 will show contents tagged "sports"; block 2 will show contents tagged "food" and "drinks"...etc. Maybe show the 5 most recent contents in each block.

I'm not trying to link to other people's contents, what I need to group together is the contents on my site. Should I use the Aggregator for this?

Thanks !

toma’s picture

toma commented

You can do that , with views, panels, and you can group section with different theme with taxonomy theme

schwa’s picture

schwa commented

I'd choose a Drupal5 theme that has 3 columns or more, like Channel 9 or Foundation -- to give you lots of options for content placement.

First create your tags (i.e., make a vocabulary and give it some terms). Then when new nodes are created, they can be tagged with the terms.

Then use Views to create a custom block, and select which fields you want to display from the nodes (title and teaser or just title, etc), decide how many nodes to list, and set the block filter for the specific term you want to collect in that block.

Important! You won't actually see that block until you give it a place to live. Under admin > blocks enable the block and place it wherever you want on your site's page. This page gives you a dropdown menu for each block with every available region in the theme where a block could be placed. If you only want these blocks visible on the front page, you can specify that in the 'block visibility' settings if you hit 'edit' for each block in the list.

(Views looks scary but is actually a super helpful tool - experiment with different settings to see the results in your new block. You can combine terms to display, filter by published/unpublished/author/time, etc etc; it's very flexible.)

Repeat as necessary for all your chunks of content.

You'll see there are a lot of pre-made blocks to enable, too, provided by the various modules.

When you get proficient with all that, you can always strike out and design a theme that has even more spaces to put blocks in, a la The Onion. Enjoy!

shipal’s picture

shipal commented

Thanks everyone, I'm playing with the Views module now, hope I can sort it out :)

Thanks again !

publishing’s picture

publishing commented

Hello DrupalNation,

A quick question regarding views content displayed in a block! Can the same code, which displays the content in a block, also be posted directly to a page(page.tpl.php--for instance)?

Working with aggregating RSS feeds and can not quite figure out how to get feeds to display, by title & category, on the home/front page of our site. Not sure where to get the code from which displays the feed!!!

If not, what is the best way to achieve the display of RSS feeds directly on the homepage of a site?

Thanking u in advance for your time,