By ekul on

I am setting up my site BreakingChaos.com to be an Independent news site that users can write articles for etc.

Anyway, i need to have a FRONT PAGE which i can chose to have what articles/etc appear on and otherwise have a number of sections or categories that the stories or articles can be posted into

For instance

News
-Local News
-World News
Entertainment
-TV
-Movies
-Music

I am a n00b to Drupal and am slightly confused over what "Vocalublary" has to do with categories. Each of these sections needs to have its own link on the left nav. bar.

Is there some kind of plugin i can download? I have that tax thing activated and i've spent hours trying to work out how to make the categories. I am still no closer.. Any help would be greatfully appreciated.

Comments

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Well, you'll want to do this with categories. First you create a vocabulary with a single or multiple hierarchy and then you add terms to it. The vocabulary can be called "News sections" or something like that, and the terms would be those which you described above. News and TV would have <root> as the parent. Local News, and World News would have News as a parent.

Then you need to decide which node types can be classified with this vocabulary (admin/taxonomy/edit/vocabulary/{vid}). Once you've got some nodes created and classified with the terms you can make the links that list everything within one section. The links will look something like this:

http://yoursite.com/?q=taxonomy/term/2

The best information available on this is in the handbook:
http://drupal.org/node/299

- Robert Douglass

-----
http://www.hornroller.com/French_Horn_News
www.webs4.com

Jaza’s picture

Jaza commented

Here's some tips to get you started using taxonomy on your site:

  1. Please read this explanation of taxonomy terms, that I wrote for someone else who had a similar problem to you. If you don't bother reading this, then don't complain if you can't understand tip #2 below.
  2. Here's what I think your site's taxonomy structure would look like (all names that I've used are examples only):
    • Vocab: News sections
      • Term: Entertainment
        • Term: TV
        • Term: Movies
    • Vocab: News regions
      • Term: US News
        • Term: West Coast
        • Term: East Coast

Your articles should automatically appear on the front page, sorted in chronological order (newest at top - just like front page of drupal.org). If you want your articles sorted by category as well, you should install the taxonomy dhtml module, and set that as your front page.

As for getting your categories shown in your left nav bar, I believe that the taxonomy module used to have a "categories" block built in, but that this is no longer the case in 4.6. Anyway, I recommend taxonomy context for creating category blocks (and for various other things). Unfortunately, as at time of writing this, taxonomy context hasn't yet been branched (upgraded) to 4.6. You might also want to look into taxonomy menu.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

ArunK’s picture

ArunK commented

I did this and allowed multiple selections for a blog/forum site I was setting up.

My categories are like this:

VOCAB: Democrats
Elections (edit term)
-- 2006 (edit term)
-- 2008 (edit term)
-- House (edit term)
-- Senate (edit term)

VOCAB: Republicans
Elections (edit term)
-- 2006 (edit term)
-- 2008 (edit term)
-- House (edit term)
-- Senate (edit term)

But, when I test it out to see if I did it correctly, I guess I'm still doing something wrong.

Suppose I want to create a blog entry in the following categories: Democrats | Elections | 2008 | Senate |

I only get: Elections | 2008 | Senate |

Why doesn't the main category Democrats doesn't show up? What am I doing wrong?

Jaza’s picture

Jaza commented

Vocabularies contain a set of terms that you can use to tag your content with. You cannot tag content with the vocabulary itself, only with the terms in it. In your case, 'democrats' has been set up as a vocabulary, so you can't use it as a tag for your blog entries.

I would recommend changing your categories to look something like this:

Vocab: Party

  • Democrats
  • Republicans

Vocab: Year

  • 2006
  • 2008

Vocab: Arena

  • House
  • Senate

See how the vocabulary names are only describing the type of terms that they contain? A vocabulary name should be a description of the type of term it holds - this is generally not something you'd ever want to use as an actual term. E.g. you wouldn't want to tag a blog entry as 'arena', you'd want to tag it with an actual term from the 'arena' vocab, e.g. as 'house'.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

And he forgot to mention that you would then apply all 3 vocabs to a node type and you would be requested to make three different classifications when you create the nodes.

- Robert Douglass

-----
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I recommend CivicSpace: www.civicspacelabs.org
My sites: www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net

pamphile’s picture

pamphile commented

Gave up too early ? I see mambo on his site...

ArunK’s picture

ArunK commented

I will try it soon. I'm still using Drupal on http://www.dialognow.com/. I used Mambo on another site I was working on, http://www.webdevhut.com/.

Thought about using Wordpress or some other blog script, but went with Drupal, I like the blog/forum combo it has.