Ordering Nodes
Our company currently uses Drupal to develop small to medium sites for our clients. We find it great to work with and only have one small issue - we often need to order nodes in a particular way.
We've found the weight and nodeorder modules but neither of these are quite what we're after: the weight module is restricted in the number of node placements available and isn't particularly user-friendly. The nodeorder module is great but works in conjunction with Taxonomy. This means that if we want a content type to be orderable, it needs to be associated with a term and then administrators need to manage nodes both through the content management interface and the ordernode interface. Again, this is overwhelming to users unfamiliar with Drupal.
The perplexing thing is that not many developers seem to have this issue. Nearly all of our sites require some type of manual content ordering, yet I'm hard pressed to find any forum posts on this topic anywhere! I've worked with Joomla on a couple of occasions (hard times) and for all its flaws, it provides a really simple, intuitive content ordering mechanism (little up and down arrows to the right of each content item).
Why don't other Drupal developers have a need for this facility?
Node Queue Module
I think the Node Queue Module will do what you want.
Node Queue
Thanks Nevets.
It kind of does what we're after but has the same problems as the nodeorder module: managing node order is totally removed from managing the content itself. Nodes have to be added to a queue individually and the actual ordering screen is seperate to the "Content Management" screen.
The other way I forgot to mention yesterday is adding a CCK weight field to the content type - this is similar to the weight module and presents similar drawbacks: weight uniqueness isn't maintained so to insert a node between two others, all nodes either above or below the new node need to have their weight shifted by 1. Also, the weight module is good in that it places a weight selector on the "Content Management" page while using the CCK technique means entering the node edit page change a weight.
So that's four separate ways that I'm aware of to achieve node ordering and whilst they all work, none of them are intuitive and a couple of them seem pretty sloppy (the weight module and weight CCK field). Our issue is that we need to hand our CMS's to non-technical clients it seems crazy to have to instruct them on how to manage their content and their content's order through separate interfaces.
If anyone's got a solution, we'd really appreciate it!
good points. I'm interested
good points. I'm interested in this too.
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Yeah that's the problem with
Yeah that's the problem with most developers, they don't think about ease of use for the end-user.
Something that comes to mind here is a slick AJAX drag and drop system. The user wouldn't even need to see the # of the weight, just a list of the node titles and they could drag them up or down the list. And then a "Save" button or something similar (-WE- know that AJAX could automatically save to the database when you let go of the mouse button but most users don't. A submit button is something they see on almost every form).
This would rawk!
http://jonahan.com
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ceej23, I feel your pain! You
ceej23, I feel your pain! You aren't alone -- I wonder why a manual node weight isn't a functionality within core, a module or even just a discussion in the community.
We have developed so many sites with a necessity for this custom node sort functionality. Especially in the context of views. We'd love something like a "nodeweight" CCK field module, which provided numeric-based weighting per node and drag-drop sorting (viewable according to role) in View pages/blocks.
In the past I've created a workaround by using cck number (integer) field for content types which I wanted to sort manually. That gave me the ability to assign a unique number to each node (like weight). Then of course, in views I'd sort that specific content type with all my custom setup (filter criteria etc.) and SORT by the integer field to get nodes ordered how I wanted them in the resulting view. But this, in and of itself, isn't an elegant solution at all, especially for non-techsavy admins. In addition to this, it would be excellent to have a dedicated module that gives you an additional menu tab for views that provided an interface for sorting nodes 'drupal-6-style' (drag-drop like with menus/blocks).
I'd really like to hear what are your requirements or 'vision' for a module that would server your purposes well. Then perhaps we could collaborate on one of the modules mentioned above to include the functionality we need or build a new module if nobody wants to go down that track. I think getting this done would be a really useful contribution.
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Have you tried the nodequeue module? This is exactly what it does and it integrates with views beautifully.
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Resolved
In case anyone is still searching for this kind of functionality, the Draggable Views module does a really good job.
There are a few drawbacks including a non-trivial learning curve and that the ordering interface is removed from the main content management page. Regardless, this module definitely helps us build simple drag and drop order management interfaces.
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