By mattengland on

Summary

How do I make URLs in the form of the following (in the "Proposed URL forms" section)? Can these all be done at the same time? If not, suggested workarounds? I want all of these URL references to have English-word components (that have simple meanings in the context of human understanding) and not numbers.

A key request: if Drupal can not handle these requirements, please please let me know early on. Such knowledge will save me a lot of time from having to futz around trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. Time is critically valuable to me at the moment (as I'm sure it is with many others in this community).

More details

I'm a complete Drupal newbie admin. I'm looking at lots of diff stuff. I have 4.5.2 (because it's the only rev with Subscriptions module, which appears to be the only thing to provide robust, automatic email notification of changed/added content?) with clean URLs enabled (and apparently working); have looked at Pathauto; have looked at URL aliasing. Maybe there's more stuff? It's all a lot to take in at the moment. While I'm wading through all these things (and how to get all these things to play nicely with each other), I thought I would post notes here so that those who have invented the wheel before me can provide guidance. (If I need to go to 4.6.x to make these things happen, please let me know.)

I have complete root-access control of my server, and I run XAMPP 1.49a (Apache 2.0.52 and suitable versions of Mysql and PHP). I have "imported" Drupal's .htaccess into my httpd.conf into its own stanza. My site/URL config:
https://myexample.com/blogs/ (yes, this is an SSL-protected site and I have all my base URLs configured and working appropriately...as far as I can tell...for I've had my Drupal site application running since this morning). Insert this name (which is not my real site domain, if that wasn't obvious ;) in place of the field in the stuff below.

For a little perspective on my "business goals" and application for this stuff: I'm a leader/manager in a hi-tech, software-development company. I'm currently high on the idea of having my developers (and other stakeholders) using blogs for "knowledge logging" as well as status reporting.

Some of these references give a smattering of what I'm thinking:

For what it's worth, I'm already using or plan to use other server apps on my site: Subversion for SCM, MediaWiki for collaborative docs, phpBB synced with GNUMailman email lists via mail2forum.com for discussion management and archiving, Bugzilla for bug and task tracking, and some klugy (sp?) stuff for design-and-requirements management--since most of the free-of-charge-open-source world seems to be poor in this area except for Doxygen...but I digress.

I'm looking for something that can handle my group-oriented blog capability as per above. So far MT, WPMU, Nucleus, and B2evolution have not measured up to where I'd like them to be. I have high hopes for Drupal.

Proposed URL forms:

Please Note: I want to avoid having to manually configure URL/path aliases every time a new users signs up (and effectively creates a new blog...hopefully automatically). Having to perform admin-root-level tasks for every new blogger/author would be a big pain and quite error prone, and I want my IT-management challenges to be minimal for my company so we can focus on our business and creating our own product. However, if I must do things manually, then I must...I'm just hoping I can set up policies that auto-direct things from the get-go, and I can just set-and-forget and tell users to go register on the blog site/app and I don't have to worry about anything from then on.

[Legend/glossary: "date" to be replaced with date formats of the form "2005/04/25" or something similar. "blogname" means the name of one and only one blog. In my site, most blogs typically have only one author because they are individual blogs, but I allow for "team" blogs and thus multiple-authors-per-blog capability...but I don't need this last feature, so if I need to ditch it to make it work, I'll do so.]

These scenarios/URLs are listed in what I perceive to be (at the moment) decreasing importance.

  1. /blogname/date/title

    Displays the blog entry with the given title (and not just a node number).

  2. /blogname

    Lists all appropriate (most-recent first) blog entries under the given blogname, as deemed per blog/site policies in a category and/or date-oriented presentation.

  3. /category

    Lists all appropriate (most-recent first) blog entries under the given category from all blognames.

  4. /blogname/category

    Lists all appropriate (most-recent first) blog entries under the given category for the given blogname.

  5. /blogname/date

    Lists all appropriate (most-recent first) blog entries on the given date (or before) for the given blogname.

  6. /date

    Lists all blog entries from all blognames and categories under the given date.

Thanks for any help pointing me in good directions to get me started with this!
-Matt

Comments

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

Sorry, I forgot to add these in my original note:

Another requirement I did not mention: I want all these URL formats to be consistent across all blogs/authors. I therefore suspect I want to control a "policy" for my entire blog site that authors can not circumvent; they are welcome to alias additional paths for their blog entries, but all the forms above must be available--and the only way I see this happening is if Drupal helps me enforce it.

Thanks again for any help!
-Matt

Steven’s picture

Steven commented

This is the sort of thing you send to a consultant, not a support forum :P. Pathauto module supports most of what you want, but some assembly is probably required.

--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

So...where do I find a Drupal consulant?

Or was that a serious comment/point?

I'm willing to pay within reason. Can anyone point me in the right direction of an appropriate Drupal consultant? Anyone is welcome to call as well.

-Matt
cell: 312-543-9916

edit: I'm in Chicago, IL, USA.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

http://drupal.org/support

-sp
---------
Test site...always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

Jaza’s picture

Jaza commented

All of the 6 types of URL that you want can be done using Drupal. I'll go through each of them and give my advice on how it would be implemented (note: the numbers refer to the items as specified in the scenarios):

  • No 1: can be done using pathauto (contributed module) out-of-the-box;
  • No's 2 and 3: all you need is the path module (part of Drupal core), and pathauto if you want it automated - actually, come to think of it, triggering creation of the URL aliases when a new category or blog is created could be tricky, as pathauto usually works at node creation time;
  • No 4: taxonomy_browser (contributed module) can filter nodes by category and by node type. Taxonomy_browser and pathauto should be all you need - but a bit of tweaking in pathauto may be needed.
  • No's 5 and 6: not really anything that does this (i.e. filtering nodes by date) ATM. Maybe you could use a modified version of event (contributed module)? You'd probably need a custom-developed module for these ones.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

Jeremy- Thanks so much for these references.

pathauto seems to work beautifully for scenarios 1, 2, and 3 (in my 4.5.2 system). No coding changes/tweaks needed or anything. I simply setup the desired URL alias values in the pathauto settings. (pathauto does *not* work well when [cat] is used in the blog-entry URL reference when blog entries change their category...but I really don't need this at the moment.) All new blog-authors and categories are aliases automatically when they are created.

And after further review, I think I can do without scenarios 5 and 6.

What I have to figure out is Scenario #4 ("/blogname/category" URL). I have tried taxonomy_browser as suggested above...and have no idea how to get this to work. taxonomy_browser mystifies me in general; it just seems to be a fancy interface for an "advanced search" module. I can't as of yet get it to create a URL that makes a combination of a blog-author name and a category name. What am I missing?

My blog home page with all my blog entries

My taxonomy_browser page

Given these views: Is this the way it taxonomy_browser (aka "TB") is supposed to present it's page? Do I have the system configured correctly? Do I have enough blog entries/categories to make it do what I want it to do? I am perplexed as to how I am able to get TB to do a "/blogname/category" like URL sort? I'm basically scratching my head and saying "huh??" The control key selects multiple entries? Where? In the pull-downs from the vocab/categories? I'm mystified.

Is a taxonomy_browser tutorial in order? All the docs I see don't seem to de-mystify anything for me. I'm happy to construct the URL myself and make a manual alias...but I don't even know where to start to figure out the syntax. I've tried lots of trial-and-error URLs with no success as of yet.

Are there any other options for /blogname/category (scenario 4)?

-Matt

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

I fixed the above file links (for "My blog home page with all my blog entries" and the one just below it) so that they work now (previously they were on the broken briefcase.yahoo.com, now they are references to Drupal.org issue-file-attachment links).

Please also see these related nodes in my pursuit to solve this problem:

http://drupal.org/node/22030
http://drupal.org/node/21832

-Matt