Ok, so I hate to spam this board and I'm really trying not to. I want to post this here because it seems like I might get a more practical response here than anywhere else on the forums. We've developed The Culture Lounge and are having a bit of trouble figuring out exactly how we want to market a couple areas of the site and are looking for the most viable solutions for these areas...
1) Media - Audio and Video, Mp3's of artists who have given us permission to use their music and video of shows that we have recorded. Ideally we would like to keep this in relatively the same section.
2) Users - Having more of a community feel where users can browse other users and such
3) Frontpage - I used views to add a flash slideshow as the header for the frontpage. We would like have the frontpage be a combination of stickied posts and all posts that can be promoted to the front page. Above all though we would to display a nice flash slide or random images from around the site.
4) Gallery - I have tried different gallery modules, the basic gallery seems to basic and gallery 2 has too much power.
Any suggestions to help me get this thing marketed right and make it a much more rich community for people.
Comments
couple of questions....
your site is off to a good start... i don't have answers for your particular questions but had a few for you:
1) what module did you use for the drop down primary menus?
2) you said you used views to create the front page flash slideshow but i don't see one on your front page? how exactly do you create a flash slideshow with views and which module did you use for the flash slideshow?
thanks
Theme
That's the multiflex37 theme, with some started css mods done but the rest can wait until I get the functionality up. What you see at the very top right is the primary links. The menu with the drop down is the secondary links. Each item that you want to have drop down needs to be set at "Expanded" and naturally each menu item was placed under the parent. The drop down effect is just a css drop-down. Some people build a flash menu to achieve the same effect but unless you want dramatic visuals with your menu, there is no reason not to stick to css.
Well the "frontpage" is a view, so just go to Views and you can edit it. There is a front page module that allows you to display a splash page and different frontpages for different user roles. Like you can make a front page that has its own CSS and information. What I did was make my own flash slideshow in flash of course and just uploaded it and embedded it into the header section of the frontpage view. Changed the input format to full html, but no go on that.
I will probably get the showcase module going once we have the gallery up, and use that instead of flash. It's ajaxy and obviously saves on bandwidth and the works. Here is the showcase module... http://drupal.org/node/93139
I saw it when I was looking at this site in the showcase... http://drupal.org/node/122211
and wanted to achieve a similar layout of the front page, with blocks across instead of just the standard core stuff.
I have the basics of drupal down, I've done quite a few sites with drupal. I'm ready to take it to the next level and need some good ideas on how to achieve these effects without moderate to massive custom coding. I am not a coder.
i see..
your not using views to feed the slideshow.. it's just embedded in the page..
fwiw, i still do NOT see any flash slideshow when i load your frontpage... just so you know i'm using firefox 1.5...
Regarding those css dropdowns.. are you saying that's a part of the theme multiflex37? Meaning:
1) you simply use that theme
2) set a menu in admin/menus to "expanded"
3) don't have to modify any css, the theme automatically translates the expanded menu option into a rollover css dropdown without any addtional coding required..
And what modules did you use for the subscriptions? Were they easy to configure /setup or have any limitations you can see going forward?
thanks for the input
Yes I understand that the
Yes I understand that the flash isn't showing, it's not for me either. I wasn't using views to feed the slideshow because I want the slideshow to be a show of the gallery which isn't up yet, so there is nothing to feed to it. That's why I was using my own flash because I have specific images to use until the gallery goes up.
Yes that theme has that menus built in but you need to remember it's the secondary menu, so you will need to create the secondary menu, and go into Menus > Settings to configure that
There is no additional coding required but it's fairly obvious in the css (this theme has 4 style sheets) as to where it's at so you can get in and make the typography and what not exactly how you want it.
The subscriptions is the ecommerce module. It's fairly easy to set up, I did use the lm_paypal for a while but it didn't have enough features. We chose the ecommerce because we will eventually be selling postcards and posters in our shop. I only have a paypal account right now so that is the payment gateway we are using. Eventually if we start making enough per month, I will get an authorize.net account so the customer always stays on our site. Those are like 200 bucks a year though so if it's a small venture you're doing, it might not be worth it.
The cool thing about both those modules above is that when someone purchases something they can be put into a certain role on the site. So you could have a site where you offer videos or downloads and they subscribe and become a member of a role who has access rights to that content (best way to make money online with little maintenence is to offer downloads) I am working on my own site now for advertising drupal stuff and have made some videos and was going to charge like 9 bucks a month for over 20 hours of videos but I figured I will just do it for free and have the reverse marketing like css zen garden, where the videos get traffic to your site and if the person can't figure out how to build their site well then they can have you build it for them.
thanks for the answers..
and being patient with my questions anthony.. i appreciate it...
regarding the ecomm/subscriptions...
a) ecomm consists of many modules.. so which exact ones do you need to enable for to provide the full subscriptions functionality?
b) a subscription can end on a variety of expriration criteria, e.g. based on time (end of month, 6 months from date of subscription, end of year, etc) or x amount of views or downloads. your example seems to model a monthly fee but puts a cap on 20 hours of video. not sure if thats 20 hours of online playback or 20 hours of elapsed content downloaded? Is the ecomm subscription capable of actually configuring, implementing and enforcing this variety of expiration capability and in various combinations? e.g. can you actually specify 4 views for the next 30 days or 5 downloads for the next 6 months.
c) upon expiration is the subscription module smart enough to email a reminder a couple of days in advance and then when account actually expires?
d) your example automatically assigns a role to a content TYPE (videos, or mp3s, etc) when ordered which is cool. But say you want to limit subcriptions to individual nodes withIN a content type. e.g. sell a subscription for video A or video B (but NOT all videos). Is the module smart enough to assign a role or some other enforcement mechanism which only allows a subscriber to see the individual node they payed for for x period of time?
e) what's the name of your own site you mention in the post?
thanks much, this should be the last in depth round of questions.. i'm just trying to prevent having to download and install the ecomm modules only to find they can't do waht i want.
Here you go
Ok so the ecommerce module will come with all the modules, I would upload them all at once and then later delete the ones you didn't enable.
I use Cart - Store - Product - PayPal - Token Then there are product types which you will select or unselect depending on what you're selling. You will need to put them all up initially because most have a lot of dependences. I didn't list them all but it will auto install the dependences.
I actually don't have a cap, but was just saying how many hours we have. If that were the case though, whatever role they are assigned to, I'm sure there is a way like with image upload caps. This could be done easier with downloading. If they are streaming content it could require a lot more coding by yourself to do this. Since the ecommerce module is an attempt to cover all types of commerce in the universe, it doesn't get too specific on any one.
Yes the module is smart enough to remind your customers, you can set the days before hand to remind them and the message to give them.
I haven't worked with the content types too much but if they make an electronic purchase, you define what the product is and I believe it is added to the menu item called "My Files" and it will be in their files until they cancel their subscription.
I'm sorry if I couldn't be of much help, ecommerce is by far the largest module I have installed and I have only had so much time to mess around with it.
I would say just put it up on a domain you have laying around and mess with it
The site it was on, the guy who was doing web design with me quit doing it and he owned the domain, so for obvious reasons I have taken all of that stuff down and am switching it over to a new domain. I can post it up on here once I get it done.
great...
i asked you the ecomm stuff purely because it is so big and it seems to leave users less than satisfied from the postings i've seen. first hand accounts really help one understand the limitations before jumping in and investing too much time on a possible dead end. much thanks.
i'm going to ask you one other related thing to the subscriptions.
there's lots of talk (confusion) on these forums about making downloads "private" files. i haven't completely wrapped my head around it and am not sure i've seen a definitive answer to the question.
were you able to make your subscriptions in such a way that the actual files, whether video or pdf, etc, were not downloadable by merely entering in the correct html path or using curl etc. Even if a user paid a subscription, once they knew the path of the underlying files and the files are not private, once their subscription runs out, they can manually type the path in and retrieve the file.. anonymous users could try various urls or look at hmtl source and guess what the paths are.
basically, did you implementation use private files and how is that enforced so that the path is hidden in the html source when the page is viewed (i imagine a video player is embedded in the page and has the path to the file clearly visible in the file)?
thanks anthony
Quickfile
From what I understand if you use the quickfile module, you can achieve the security you are looking for.
Panels
I suppose I will implement the panels module and see how it turns out.