Does Drupal do relational tables?

By Brook on 25 Jan 2008 at 20:38 UTC

Hi All

I'm a php newbie so please bear with me.

If I have a movie website (powered by drupal) and when I run news stories or articles about a partifular movie - and I want to include a list of related actors to that movie - how would I do it?

I would then want to create a 'homepage' for each actor, which will include lists of the latest news, articles etc related to that actor.

Is this possible with Drupal? If so how would it work and does it require modules or will stock Drupal be able to do it?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Comments

Drupal is relational! One

gpk commented 26 January 2008 at 01:20

Drupal *is* relational!

One way:

Using taxonomy module, create a vocabulary called "actors". Each term (category, tag) in this vocab will be an actor. Allow multiple selections ... Then tag each story or article with the relevant actors.

Then e.g. taxonomy/term/3 will bring up all pages tagged with actor 3. You can create a URL alias if you want using the path module so that this can be the actor's name.

Using Views module http://drupal.org/project/views you can customise this 'homepage' in terms of what is displayed and how it is sorted. But you'll probably want to have a play with taxonomy first. Like Drupal, Views is powerful (= can take some time to get the hang of, but well worth the effort). On the other hand, you may have trouble getting it to present the relevant articles/info in the way you want. So, there are other things you can do too, depends a bit what you want. Have a look at the contributed Panels and Contemplate modules. You should also be familiar with how the core "blocks" functionality works.

You might also want to use CCK (Content Construction Kit) to set up a custom content type that you use for actors' homepages.

Worth exploring all of these - should get you 99% of the way to wherever you want to be, without the need for any PHP ;-)

gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk

think you are expert only a

alb commented 26 January 2008 at 10:01

think you are expert only a question regards vocabular
is possible insert content only inner a vocabulary

example BOOKS (that is a vocabolary with no terms)
with Taxonomy menu is possible to insert a content also if I not have terms?

A vocabulary is not the top

gpk commented 26 January 2008 at 14:55

A vocabulary is not the top level term/primary category. It lets you define a single "tagging system", if you like, for your content. You can have multiple "tagging systems" if you want. So you could have vocabulary 1: "actors"; vocabulary 2: "directors"; vocabulary 3: "country of production"; vocabulary 4: "genre".

In the simplest terms, taxonomy module just lets you "tag" content. But it also lets you do much more than that.

I suggest you just enable it on a test site and experiment. And check out:
http://drupal.org/node/120624
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy and some of the subpages

You can configure a number of options for your vocabularies: for example, are the tags in a tree structure? Whether or not you have to select a term (tag) for a given node? Which content types the vocabulary applies to? It should be able to do everything you want.

>Also module category you think is useful and when ?
The contributed "Category" module is quite complicated - you need to get the hang of taxonomy first, which can probably do everything you want anyway.

Just to confuse you (!!) .. note that in Drupal 5, when you go to the main admin page, to configure taxonomy stuff you need the link at the top of the page that says "Categories" ...!

gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk

is possible to do this:

alb commented 26 January 2008 at 19:45

is possible to do this:
if I have in a menu this
BOOK (vocabulary)
- Book 1 (term)
- Book 2 (term)

is possible if I click on BOOK to see in the page not the articles inner terms but that who I want?
example see only my test
or see again the terms Book 1, Book 2 ?

One good example I think is the voice Administer in drupal's menu:
if you consider the voice Administer as a vocabulary you can see that I
would like to do.
When click on administer you have some subcategory in sidebar menu: Content management,
Site building, User management, Logs, Help
that are also in the page.