Learning Drupal tough for old timer
I am new to Drupal, but have been a web developer for many years. I want to switch to Drupal because I want to use a consistent CMS for the websites I develop. Drupal certainly looks like it should fill the bill, but I'm having difficulty understanding the way it works. The basic tutorials are fine and I have the two Apress books: "Building Online Communities with Drupal ..." and "Pro Drupal Development". I'm missing that "ah-ha" moment of understanding. I look at nodes, stories, pages, etc. and am having trouble getting them to all link together cohesively in my mind.
For example, speaking completely in the abstract, in the course of building a website I create pages. On those pages I might have multiple stories. They might just be headlines that when clicked on expand to the full text or perhaps use the "teaser" concept and show the first few lines, then expand when clicked on. In a similar fashion, I might also have a page for press releases, where they are shown with links to the headline and clicking on them displays the full press release either on the same page, or in a new window. I've built all of this before quite easily in PHP and MySQL, but I can't seem to figure it out in Drupal. I used the press release concept because there is a nice tutorial on creating a module for them. Simple, but to the point. So using those two examples, how would I put stories on a page? I create content just fine, but how do I place them on a page. If I create a page, it has a place for me to put html, but do I have to manually put the links to the stories there? That's no problem for me, but what about the client that doesn't understand much about urls? Then there's the press release example - if I create a press release, I shouldn't have to manually put a link to it on the Press Release display page.
I know many of you are rolling your eyes because I don't get it, but we've all been there where we don't see the obvious. This is one for me. If any of you have good explanations or can direct me to a page that gives a really good description of both the constructs and the usage, I will be in your debt.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
=-=
what you need to spend some time with is "taxonomy" aka categories. in adminsiter -> categories you can create a vocabulary, once that is done, you can add terms to that vocabulary. Now when you create content you can categorize it. Once that is done, you have pages you can refer to like term/1
example.
create a vocabulary called news.
create a term called local news
associate this with say, the blog.module
now create a blog entry, you will have a drop down menu. where you can submit this blog node to local news.
you will than have a listing page, at yoursite.com/local-news where all local news will be lisited. you can then add this path to your menu in adminsiter -> menus or create an entirely new menu for all news listings.
Drupal doesn't handle lists,
Drupal doesn't handle lists, natively, very well. You can use taxonomy to do lists, but you don't have much control.
See this: 20 Steps to Views Happiness
Pay close attention to the step where it tells you to have a beer. It's a very important step!
-- Merlin
[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
Terminology
I agree with VM and merlin.
Drupal has a learning curve, but once you get the basics, you'll start to see quick progress. You can create the Press Releases page you describe without writing a single line of code.
There is a bit of a terminology confusion, since Drupal uses 'page' to mean many things.
A 'page' is a type of content (a node) that consists of a title and some text. That text might be HTML, PHP, or plain text.
A 'page' is also a webpage generated by a Drupal callback function, such as those provided by the Views module or the Taxonomy module.
One helpful concept to grasp can be seen if you look in your themes folder. Find the file /themes/garland/node.tpl.php. This file controls the default presentation of content items (nodes) for your site.
If you notice, there are actually two templating functions here, one for a single-node page view and one for a list-based node overview (the teaser view). It is the teaser view that you are referring to when you ask "how do I make a page?"
In the code, the
<?php if ($page == 0): ?>section means "Show this if we are looking at a page of teasers."Merlin is right, Drupal creates a few default "teaser view pages" that are fairly simple. Find them at the paths:
* node
* taxonomy/term/X (where X is a taxonomy term ID)
The Views module lets you create custom pages of content lists. For example, if you have a "Press Release" node type, you can use Views to show the X most recent teasers at the path 'press_releases'.
See also: http://drupal.org/node/21951 [Drupal terminology]
http://drupal.org/phptemplate [PHP template -- Drupal's page logic]
http://drupal.org/node/11816 [Node.tpl.php]
The menu system documentation may also help, if you know PHP. It discusses how Drupal maps URLs to content-building functions. http://api.drupal.org/api/HEAD/group/menu
--
http://ken.blufftontoday.com/
http://new.savannahnow.com/user/2
Search first, ask good questions later.