Hello,
The path aliases are great at converting tech-sounding urls to human readable ones. However, I am wondering if they create usability issues related to site structure and breadcrumb navigation.
For example, urbanvancouver.com has a 'Neighbourhoods' taxonomy with several categories, one of which is Vancouver. The url is: http://www.urbanvancouver.com/neighbourhoods/vancouver. There are two issues here:
1.) The breadcrumb on this page shows Home>>Vancouver and not Home>>Negihbourhoods>>Vancouver, as one would expect. Is there an easy way in Drupal/Civicspace to ensure that the breadcrumb navigation gets updated automatically, based on the menu defined or a taxonomy that is created?
2.) If I move up a level to urbanvancouver.com/neighbourhoods, all I get is a blank page. How can I make this a kind of index page for the neighbourhoods section? For example, I would like to add a grid-layout that pulls in and displays the content from each neighbourhood in one grid.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Ramdak
Comments
Alias something to '/neighbourhoods'
Once you alias something to that address, the menu handler would be able to pick it up and put in the breadcrumb, plus you are going to have a summary page.
Sure?
Are you sure? I thought aliases were handled way before any other menu handling occurred. As far as the menu is concerned, the alias does not exist and the user typed in the real URL.
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Drupal is lacking this
Ramdak,
What you described is also one of the things that I consider essential for a good web site: clear and hierarchical URLs, with perfectly matching hierarchical breadcrumbs. Unfortunately, this is something that Drupal does not yet offer... not out of the box, anyway.
In order to get the breadcrumb navigation and the index pages for taxonomy terms, you will need to install taxonomy_context.module. Most people use this module for its taxonomy-based menu block (personally, I try to keep blocks to an absolute minimum), but I use it because it generates breadcrumbs based on taxonomy terms; because it allows you to enter a 'description' for each term, which then becomes that term's "index page"; and also because it can generate a list of subterms and append that list to the description.
Sadly, neither taxonomy_context nor any other module will give you hierarchical URLs. However, I have developed a patch that will find the alias of a node or taxonomy term, find the alias(es) of its parent(s), and then join these together to form a truly hierarchical path. Please visit my site to see this patch in action. I've only just finished testing the patch, and it's really quite messy, as well as totally undocumented. I'm hoping to release it (here on the drupal.org forums, and on my site) within the next week, but I will have to find and document all the code changes that I made, before it's ready for other people to use (I made it for 4.5.1, by the way).
This is not the first thread I've seen where people are asking about this feature: hierarchical URL aliases is something that I suspect many Drupal users would like. So I will do my best to hurry up and get my patch ready! In the meantime, good luck with taxonomy_context - it's truly one of Drupal's most valuable modules.
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
PS: I love the design of Urban Vancouver! Good work, mate.
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
Re: Drupal is lacking this
Jaza,
First up, sorry if I gave the impression of designing the urbanvancouver site. Didn't mean to. I was just using it as an example.
Thanks for the tip about taxonomy_context. I didn't know it could do this although I had used it for something else. Will look forward eagerly to your patch for the breadcrumb trail.
I also feel updates of breadcrumb navigation should not be limited only to situations where a taxonomy is used. It should work even when someone uses a freshly created menu system through blocks.
Ramdak
We did UrbanVancouver.com
It was put together ina hurry, hasn't had updates to the code for a while, and runs mainly core Drupal modules.
Taxonomy_context would be a way to go for this. There is no "auto-aliasing", so everything you see is manually aliased. "neighbourhoods" is a vocabulary itself, so technically it would contain *all* terms...don't know how useful that would be.
Auto-aliasing -- esp. of hierarchical vocab terms -- is a tricky situation. Today I find that I prefer manually aliasing, since it only gets done once (as part of initial taxonomy definition and setup). This gives maximum flexibility. Of course, some people might want to take advantage of helper modules. I certainly would like to see something like that for book hierarchies.
We should probably point "neighbourhoods" at something, like perhaps a map of what all the neighbourhoods refer to.
Re: Urban vancouver
Boris,
Thanks for the excellent how-tos on Bryght.com. Can't tell you how much I have learned from them about administering civicspace sites, despite all the info available in the Drupal handbook and the forums.
What I am talking about is subsite structure and its accompanying navigation and how Drupal/Civicspace should make this process easier. On Urbanvancouver.com, neighbourhoods is a special subsite. Jakob Nielsen's article is a good explanation of my the requirements I mentioned in my original post:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9609.html
Ramdak
I understand. Ideally,
I understand. Ideally, taxonomy.module (or a contrib) should be upgraded to include the vocabulary name (in this case, "Neighbourhoods") as part of the breadcrumb.
Taxonomy_context is probably closest to working this way.
However, I don't consider this a subsite in Nielsen's sense. Subsites make sense for "static" style content, but on UV.com in particular, it's just another way of slicing information. For static info, I tend to use book pages to indicate structure, which does display breadcrumbs as expected.
Thanks for the comments on the how-to's. Have to make time to merge/update with Drupal.org, but we've been too busy.
Feel free to use the contact tab on my info page here to get in touch directly.
still not understanding too well
I am bringing this up again because I am still trying to get a grip on what I notice on many Drupal/Civicspace based sites, although I understand your comment about different ways of slicing information.
On kerneltrap.org, for example, there is this page http://kerneltrap.org/journals/computers on which postings from a couple of blogs are aggregated and displayed. One of them is called xedx's blog and has the url of http://kerneltrap.org/blog/8210. Correctly enough, this is the home page of xedx's blog. But, going up a directory gets me a 'page not found' error, which is the problem referred to in the previous posts on this thread.
But, the read more link for one of xedx's blog entries points to http://kerneltrap.org/node/4643- a completely different directory structure. Leave alone information architecture and other fancy terms, I just wonder what effect this has on a user's mental picture of the site.
Just wanting to understand this, that's all.
mass-aliasing
i also think, this would be a important possibility which is currently hard to do with drupal.
i'm using the taxonomy_block modul for generating an automatic block with the last entries for a category, but there is no possibility to display the block only for items in this category...
for now i'm doing a manual mass-path-aliasing for the items to fit my path-regex...
have i missed a better solution?
an automatic solution would be really great
one url alias to include them all
not sure if this helps but via the url alias it's possible to provide a term
taxonomy/term/133/all
where it gets all the sub categories. this can be turned into
sitename.com/vancouver
where the path /vancouver gets all the posts contained in the sub categories as well.
you could obviously put neighbourhood in the url alias as well.
[]+][+][+[]
erik mallinson
http://coacalina.org
question re: google ads & neighborhoods
I am very new to Drupal - more of a graphics/flash type person - but I am about to launch a couple of sites base on Drupal and I will need something like "neighborhoods" as discussed here.
I notice that the google ads change with each neighborhood. How is this accomplished?
Sorry if I am a bit off-topic.
I am desperately trying to wrap my brain around taxonomy and many other things-drupal ... a lot to learn!