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| Project: | Field collection |
| Version: | 7.x-1.x-dev |
| Component: | Code |
| Category: | feature request |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | active |
Issue Summary
I've been impressed by theverge.com's structural design of it's articles, and it's ability to show contextual content. I've been thinking about how something as flexible can be accomplished with Drupal. I believe the key to it involves field collections, so that's why I'm posting this here. What follows is more of a vision/hope for what field collections could grow into.
Field collections are a way to structure singular or repeating "field sets". Collections are re-usable and most likely one field collection by itself would not consists of an entire page's contents. Right now field collections have to be created on the content type they are associated with and then the collection has its fields added and edited separately. Then this field collection be can added again and again to other content types. I believe a more robust solution would be if instead of adding one field collection as a node's field, you would add a field collection selector.
When adding the field collection selector, you choose what collections are available to the end user. When the end users clicks "Add" button they now have a list of options to choose from that have been crafted by the designer. Designers can now craft field collections as different elements of a page, and those elements can be created and placed in any order the end user desires.
Here is an example of how an article from the verge would breakdown. (The breakdown) with field collections selectors.
That page requires at most four field collections...
- Banner Image,
- WYSIWYG
- WYSIWYG with Sidebar
- Centered Images
The field collection selector could be built a top the entity reference module, but it would require figuring this out #1261574: Create reference if it doesn't exist first.
The icing on the cake, would be to have some form of visual sorting for the field collections. That way a user could drag and drop the content to re-order them as they see fit. The "Draggable Views" module can already can do this for nodes, but it doesn't yet fully work with field collections.
I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Comments
#1
Openpublish guys are going to adapt node connect http://drupal.org/project/nodeconnect to entity reference http://drupal.org/node/1409338 this would allow creating and referencing.
#2
mefisto75 Thanks! This is great, but it looks like any field_collections work has stalled. #1067308: Integration with field_collection. While you could create content types as different elements of a page, I don't think this would be ideal.
#3
#4
I read thru' it but I am still not sure what it is about. If I don't get it wrong, there is a wish to go in a certain direction with the module concept dealing with multiple use of field collections? But it fraightens me because I don't know how much flexibillity loss is the price for that ... In the moment the module fills a gap for better content structure, I wouldn't like to see the boat sinking. It makes it possible to automate repeating field group structure. Or is your issue just about the reusage of the collections made?
btw, isn't it rather a feature request than a bug report ?
#5
oh :) ... tim.plunkett was faster :-P
heh ...
BTW: animelion: I have changed your startpost a lil' bit, because your first link to theverge was broken.
#6
Thanks for all the wonderful feedback. And thanks Digidog and tim.plunket for the corrections. I'm going to play around more with "nodeconnect" tomorrow and follow up on this post. If this issue #1067308: Integration with field_collection is resolved then it will be exactly what I was talking about above, just in a separate module.