By Interzone on

Hello,

I've workong on getting a new site primed with Drupal and I have to say it's excellent and very powerful. Many things I struggled with in Joomla can be done with ease in drupal. It meets every need for most information / advertising portals with nicely.

That said, I've come across sever potential bugs or at least systemic roadblocks. I've searched Drupal but haven't seen any clear answers so I wanted to post the list here to see if there was a native CMS oriented way to deal with these issues or if I'm going to have to hack

1) There seems to be no way to customize meta titles and the on-page titles (so that they are totaly independent of one another). I tried the Page Title module and it doesn't seem to work.

2) when using the internationalization modules, there are a couple issues that I haven't resolved:

a) While the controls on "Site information" work brilliantly in English to allow one to define the index page and set the copyright footer, you hit a brick wall once you add a second language. There seems no way to do either of these things.

b) Also, all the URLs now have /en/. Is there a way to disable the iso language code for the default language? I understand it's needed for the others, especially if page names remains the same, but it's a bit awkward to see this for the default language. Any tweaks for this?

3) The menues would great, but when it comes to the footer menu, it's not reallywaht I need. Is there a way to make them display all items horizontaly rather than vertically? Footers normally display in one row with many columns horzontally, here we have 1 column with new rows for each item which is not the best way obviously. I counldn't find any modules to deal with this. Any ideas?

5) Is there any way to unlock My blog and My acccount so that their position / menu assoication can be changed? I guess I don't see a good reason to keep them locked (though to make them not deleteable is a good idea).

5) Remove "Primary links" from the top of the page. I deleted this menu, but "Primary links" just stays put.

6) THere seems to be no way to translate Taxonomy "Vocabluaries". I am able to localize the Glossay entirely, with the exception of this. Is there a way to do this or some module?

That is my laundry list of bugs, which aren't many considering that the entire site is almost done. I can easily hack all of these things, but before doing so, I wanted to see if the CMS or existing modules could handle these things.

Any wisdom would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.5.x or older

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

For 1, regarding meta data have your checked out Meta tags?

For 3, it is a matter of using CSS to style the menu. If you do not know how to do this you might want to read CSS Design: Taming Lists on "A List Apart" (Look down for "Navigation).

For 5, if you do not want the primary menu at all, edit your page.tpl.php file, locate $primary_links and remove the print statement. You may also want to remove any associated html.

Interzone’s picture

Interzone commented

Thanks for the reply, yes Meta Tags does the description and keyword and a variety of other things beatifully, but not the meta title for some reason. I'll check into the others. Many thanks.

It looks like I left out #4, lol.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I manage the "My Account" menu item by creating a new menu item for the "user" path. I name it "Login." Then when the menu is generated, "My Account" is a submenu of "Login." You can edit "Login" and move it to a different menu. If you disable or delete "Login," your "My Account" menu item will come back where you don't want it.

If you never want these menu items to appear, move it to a menu that you don't display. You can always access the "my account" page by going to the "user" path on your site.

If you just don't like the "Navigation" menu, just make the Navigation menu's BLOCK display optional and for admins only.

I wouldn't say that your problems are bugs! I'm sorry I know nothing about your internationalization woes. But all your other issues have solutions that work well in Drupal (in my experience) and the trick is just finding the right modules and fixing up your theme a bit more.

Interzone’s picture

Interzone commented

Yes, I found a work around to it by creating a new navigation menu and relagating the my blog and my account to something called the user menu... my blog always comes before my account, I was hoping to find a way to weither them with repect to the order just make them appear in an order I find logical, but I guess it's bot a huge deal, more of a minor bother.

The issue that I consider to be the biggest one is the inability to conrol the index page in foreign langauges and translate the footer, those are pretty fundamental things.

I'm doing a site in English and Spanish and the Spanish index page is always www.site.com/es which is a 404. I can't create content for /es nor does the redirect seem to work to resolve this issue. I guess maybe I'll need to create a hack of some sort. The other things will keep, but this one won't unfortunately.

Thanks for the feedback.

Interzone’s picture

Interzone commented

Actually, in Drupal 6.0's Beta many of these issues have been fixed:

"Also, all the URLs now have /en/. Is there a way to disable the iso language code for the default language? I understand it's needed for the others, especially if page names remains the same, but it's a bit awkward to see this for the default language. Any tweaks for this?" - Fixed in 6.0

"Is there any way to unlock My blog and My acccount so that their position / menu assoication can be changed? I guess I don't see a good reason to keep them locked (though to make them not deleteable is a good idea)." - Fixed in 6.0

"Remove "Primary links" from the top of the page. I deleted this menu, but "Primary links" just stays put." - Fixed in 6.0

I guess I'll have to wait and see if the others are fixes as well.