By David Latapie on

Drupal come bundled with a lot of different way to write an article. At least four:

  • blog
  • book
  • page
  • story

My question is: why so much of them? Dries proposes to abandon book (I agree: book is just a bundle of article and hierarchisation, and the outline module already allows hierarchisation for the rest. Redundancy → deletion), but we still have blog, page and story.

Now, if you have to convince someone that the three of them are indispensable, what would you tell her?

Thank you.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

David Latapie’s picture

David Latapie commented

So, it seems only two writing modules really make sense: Page and Story (I will convert my blog posts to story then deactivate the blog post modul, by the way). Still, I have a hard time understanding the differences between a page and a story. After reading this whole discussions, I came to the conclusion than Page and Story are similar to the point of being redundant and of historical/legacy use. I propose new user to just deactivate one of the two modules (say Page, since Story seems to be used a bit more often) and not look back.

Lowell’s picture

Lowell commented

how about if we just deactivate all of them and create one of our own?

When I first started using drupalm, this concept alluded me. Now that I know how to CKK, etc, the page and story, and every other prepackaged content type are useless.

just my 2-cents

David Latapie’s picture

David Latapie commented

I don’t know how to use CKK (I did not even understand what it is meant for). I don’t plan to give it a try before I feel comfortable enough with more basic Drupal handling. Plus, CKK is definitely something more advanced and my question is more about “out-of-the-box” Drupal.

Thank you for your comment, still. That I do not share your view doesn’t mean I did not appreciated your input :-)

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

They are almost the same. Content wise they are the same but they ship with different default publishing options.

* A page doesn't post author information, timestamps or comments by default.
* A story does post author information, timestamps or comments by default.

They are examples of content types and for Drupal 5 there is only ONE module. They are merely two different defined settings is all.

Whether you keep or reomve them depends entirely on your site and it's architecture.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

David Latapie’s picture

David Latapie commented

I think this shall be clarified, as it clearly confuse new user. Maybe a new description a even renaming them: Story becomes article and page becomes static page. All of a sudden, bloggers get it. When a confusion can be fixed in such an easy way as renaming template, this is quite attractive.

Your idea?

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Traditionally in the last several years worth of Drupal versions there was a story module and a page module that existed as well so keeping these initial names is consistent with our existing user base.

Limited audience. Drupal is not merely a 'blogging' platform. So I would be more in favor of expanding the existing documentation to appeal/educate a broader user base then just the blogging class.

What explanation would make more sense in that context?

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

David Latapie’s picture

David Latapie commented

I think, but I may be wrong, that a lot of potential as well a new Drupal users have a background in blogging, hence my suggestion about bloggers. For the explanation, I find “static page” more understandable than “page” and article more so than “story”. But, again, I come from blogging, where these terms are better known.

A possibility could be to add in descriptions: “stories are like post in blogs” and “pages are like static pages in blogs”. That way, the Drupal terminology is kept while helping (bloggers) newcomers to get the point. Sort of a win-win situation.

Just my two cents.

If you think my proposal is reasonable, where should I post it so that it would have a broader audience (read: read by the dev’)?

Have a nice day.

Dread Knight’s picture

Dread Knight commented

"I think, but I may be wrong, that a lot of potential as well a new Drupal users have a background in blogging, hence my suggestion about bloggers. For the explanation, I find “static page” more understandable than “page” and article more so than “story”. But, again, I come from blogging, where these terms are better known."

+1 for
story >> article
page >> static page

I stared a lot at the create content page saying wt* should i choose O_o
and why do i need to activate a module called "Blog" described as "Enables keeping easily and regularly updated user web pages or blogs." only to get a thing that i was already being able to do, only called "Blog entry" for the sake of consistency and old drupal users is rather lame and it kinda labels potential/new users with the "sucka" tag.

I actually got to this page googling to find out what's the real difference between the "create content" elements.

It shouldn't matter if you come from a blogging background or not, it's not the point of a CMS to judge you by that; don't complicate things more than they already are!

Drupal is a great CMS, my #1 choice, but if small issues like that are not taken into consideration, then there is no wonder why Joomla is getting so much ground.

~!Obey King Dread Knight!~

joomla-fan’s picture

joomla-fan commented

Hello,
I am new here and was also confused by the page, story, blog and so on. Normally I use PAGE for the content because most of them are static and I don't want any comments. Recently I went a little deeper and read more about Drupal, the notes and the first newsletter got my attention.

As a designer I need only two: Page (or story) and Image, in other word I need TEXT and IMAGE. Thats all.

Thanks
Wizan

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

you only need two, then use two! Next week you want a third, it's there! In a year you need twenty, make some with the create content type!

~silverwing - loves the create content type. seriously.

_____________________________________________
MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I know this is an old thread but I agree too. In fact in the German Drupal version story = article, so that makes more sense to me (as my first site development was in German so coming back to the English being 'story' did confuse me!)

I like what sepeck explained too that each are simply different defaults that are shipped with Drupal to make it easier for most to start using it 'out-of-the-box'.

What would really help would be to have the difference clearly displayed in a pretty graphic somewhere so that straight away you can see which it is that you need. Perhaps this exists somewhere on D.o?

And silverwing also had a good point, that the default content types are there for when or if you need to use them.

After that of course you can use Content Construction Kit for designing your own content types with custom fields etc for specialised content.

garg_art’s picture

garg_art commented

I know that the learned ones know how each one fits, but what would be nice is to have use cases under which each one fits the best right out of the box. Again, the smartest of all can interchange and we can continue to have them all. However, the best would be a cheat sheet that says if for content type XXXXX on a website Story fits the bill the best. And so on.

In an effort to make Drupal powerful, we should not make this an SAP (or pick your flavor of ERP) which won't work before one spends millions.

I feel Drupal is getting there. Although Drupal 6 is an effort to make it simpler based on my 30 minutes on it.