Categories as Menu Items
BLByrne - February 26, 2008 - 21:52
I am creating a website that is a blog site with multiple authors and multiple categories. How do I set menu items linking to only blog posts of that category. For instance, I want "Politics", "Movies", "T.V." as links, and when you click they link you to only stories in that Topic.
Thanks for the help!
take a look at fastcompany.com...
the site is built on drupal, and they have not aliased the top level category navigation...it's very easy to do.
I am also interested in
I am also interested in this. You say it is very easy to do - would you be kind enough to explain step by step how to do it?
Things only seem easy in drupal when you already know the solution, but WTF springs to mind when you are still a drupal newbie :)
actually, there are some better explanations on drupal already..
if you do a search for 'newspaper site' you'll find links from many contributing authors explaining how they did what they did and which modules they used and how they used them...very helpful stuff.
as far as fast company, it looks really basic, like some views for home page, here's the piece they wrote on drupal: http://drupal.org/node/221481
excerpt, "Views, CCK, BuddyList, and Organic Groups form the backbone of the site's structure, and a host of off-the-shelf contrib modules were used to add additional functionality. Examples include Views Fastsearch, used to build customized search screens for specific sections of the site, and the SimpleFeed module, which pulls in the content for each user's customizable news feed."
that top level nav you see is just relative links to categories, and views are used to show little teasers and all of that, and the bulk of what's impressive is the styling of the site...if you look at the footer, you can see the general site map structure - OG really is what's driving their entire community thing...views is what's driving their entire custom page layouts (by category etc) and CCK is what's letting them pull in assorted attributes from different pages using views (e.g. instead of a page just having subject/body they've obviously added tons of other fields)...and buddylist is their 'social networking application' (like 'friends' on drupal6, but buddylist is d5)
what's funny is that several of the things they're doing with modules are now drupal6 core - like block caching for busy sites, some of the admin tools and so on..
they also say that a custom module 'node cluster' (soon to be on drupal) was designed to heavily modify presentation of profiles...personally, i'm more interested in d6 in using the new contentprofile module with friends/notice feed (adds facebook features, including corkboard/wall) and then use CCK and views perhaps to really tweak it out...
take a look around. there are tons of tutorials on how people do these things...you'd be surprised sometimes by how simple it is on drupal. and if you're not going after fastcompany features, you can probably do 90 percent of it with views, cck and OG...
some clarification..
so let me just clarify your original question: about navigation...this is just a small workflow example.
i've got a site, there's local news. it covers sports, arts, business and politics. i create a vocabulary called 'localnews' and add the terms to it (4 terms, sports arts etc) - then i go to the content type 'story' (admin/content/content types) and in configure i tell drupal that users submitting a story must submit to one of the four terms from the vocabulary 'localnews' - now when a writer goes and writes a story, he/she sees that little dropdown, picks 'sports' and voila, it's in sports (and maybe there are tags, etc, who knows what else you might want to add to that content type)...
now in my nav i don't want just 'localnews' - i don't want 'sports' in some second level navigation, i want it right up top like in boston.com. so i go to admin/ and go into menus, primary links (these are the top level choices you see, like 'documentation, download, forums' on drupal) - i add an item and the path is not 'localnews' it is localnews/sports (or i set up a url alias like 'sports and it's just 'mysite.com/sports') - so a user clicks on 'sports' and goes right into just the sports stories...
but now i realize that what they're looking at is not teasers, it's like a long ass page full of big articles, so i can then look into using views or assorted node display type modules to configure and manipulate what that page actually looks like (in the fastcompany example, it would be using views to pull up just the titles of the most recent X articles and some images and so on)...views is very powerful.
Superb Answer
Thanks Zilla for a great response. This is the type of answer a newcomer like me needs in order to understand and learn how to manipulate drupal. Wonderful :)
you're more than welcome...
at some point i oughta compile new and existing 'beginner' tutorials that focus on workflow, not mods and installation - searching the site for this is tough, even using google to search drupal...needs some tags and all of that...
Beginner tutorials are a great idea
I think beginner tutorials which focus on how to quickly achieve a given outcome would be superb and highly valued. As you rightly point out, finding relevent information is like swimming in soup.
Thanks for any tips
Jim