Hi everyone;
This is my first post, and I'm actually a beginner to Drupal.
I'm going to run my first Drupal project, but I'm a little confused with the content type and views thing. My website is going to be a Web 2 directory of a kind of products brands. I just don't know where to start and use which feature of Drupal as what! Here is a short summary of what I need:
There are several Brands in the directory. What the Brands actually do is to categorize the Shops. For examples, there are two brands named Brand A and Brand B. Also there are three shops selling the products of these brands. Something like this:
Brand A: Shop1, Shop2
Brand B: Shop1, Shop3
On the other hand, there are some information on the Brands pages too, like News and Blog Posts, Featured Shops, Shops Going on a Sale etc.
Also the Shop pages have some (kind of static or rarely updated) information too, like Name and Description, Address, Contact Info, Showing the Position on Google Maps, URL etc.
There are other kinds of dynamic (or frequently updated) information on the Shop page (or profile) too, like News and Blog Posts, Season Sales, Photo Galleries etc.
Authenticated users can add Shops to their Favorite Shops list to get the latest news or get notifications about sales. They also can write reviews of shops and comment on the other reviews. They can rate the shop or participate in the contests or discussions created by the Shop owner, and the other things like these.
What I need to know is where to start, and know what are Brand, Shop and other things listed like Blog Posts, or Reviews IN THE DRUPAL! Which of them must be defined as a content type, and which of them can be done using Views module.
I've done projects like this using WordPress, but WordPress was too limited for me, so I decided to switch to Drupal, but I'm actually a little confused with the concepts of Drupal.
I'm kind of familiar with Drupal, so there is no need to mention how to add content types or fields! Just steer me in the right direction! Thank you all :)
Comments
_
Drupal can definitely be confusing at first-- it's perfectly normal.
For the most part content types are for grouping related information via fields. Views is for creating and displaying various listings, which can be searchable, of drupal entities (nodes, users, taxonomy terms, etc).
Usually I would create a 'brand' as a taxonomy vocabulary but in this case it sounds more like they should be their own content type along with 'shop'. Then you can related shops to brands with the entityreference or relation modules.
One other option you might want to consider if shops or brands will have different sets of 'users', is using the og module.
_
Thanks you very much, it helped a lot.
Let me know why you think it's better for brands to be content types, not taxonomy vocabularies.
And as a question, when I have brands as content types, how can every brand have it's own news blog? Is it managed using Views?
There are just one set of users, who browse through the brands and find a nearby shop to visit. After shopping, they may like to write a review, so they open the shop profile again, and write it down. That's all. How can OG module help me with this?
Thank you very much :)
_
No need for og then.
And based on your followup, I actually think brand would be better off as terms in a vocabulary. That way 'every brand can have it's own blog' as you stated. And yes, you could manage the display of these related items with views (or perhaps panels or display suite depending on how complex the page layout you want is).