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By droogie on
I am very new to Drupal, so forgive with me here if I don't have the lexicon right. Let me simply describe exactly what i want to achieve.
My goal is to have a site where I can post news and blog submissions in a "river," for several different categories (politics, sports, etc). I assume my best way of doing this is with a section vocabulary (but would love finding out there's something easier).
For example:
The Primary nav might be:
Home | Library | About
Under it, would appear this menu (when library is clicked)
Politics | Sports | Religion
The second line is merely the "library section" vocabulary. Each topic is a container which appears like a self contained river of news and info about that major topic area. Each could have "news items" and "blog items" tagged to that category.
My questions:
1: Is there some out of the box way to do dynamic sectioning? I was told that secondary links are really designed for static pages, and not setting up dynamic sections, but something tells me that might be wrong.
2: Assuming there is no out-of-the-box way to use the secondary links, and I have to configure a vocabulary as the submenu myself, what steps do I have to take to make that menu appear horizontally in my template. Do I need to make it a custom block, and then have that block inserted to the header? If so, is there a really simple example I can follow for making such a custom block?
If there is a simple tutorial for this sort of site layout, i've not be able to find it. Thanks in advance.
Comments
Check out the mentioned modules
The approach you've outlined is how I achieve similar for our office intranet. I have a vocabulary called "Topic" with appropriate structure built in. Each post gets tagged with one or more Topic terms, and I use the built in taxonomy browser to display the "river of news".
Two enhancements you might like to experiment with:
1. Taxonomy Menu ... use this to dynamically create menu entries rather than building a custom menu structure manually.
2. Pathauto ... use this to create term and node paths that are search engine friendly (eg: library/sport/cricket instead of taxonomy/term/43).
As for your "horizontal" menu ... a few themes come with "Suckerfish" menus, or you could try the Nice Menus module. This will create a drop down menu from an existing menu tree for you.
Good luck .. I think you'll find your solution pretty easy though ... your scenario is a Drupal strength.
Thank you matt. While
Thank you matt.
While waiting for a post, I was exploring Joomla to see if it was any easier. Doesn't look like it.
I hope all of that stuff is upgraded to 6.x.
Might I be able to see your site, or one like it, so I can refer to it intelligently as I proceed?
About the horizontal menu. I really wasn't think of a dropdown, but a fixed sub nav menu that appears fixed under the primary "library" link, with the news objects displayed in the content area below. One term would be the defaulted select. I have to understand the nodes better, to figure out where this vocabulary is parented. What mechanism or view will make it appear on every page, so long as "Library" is selected? Still pretty confused, as I am still very new to drupal.
Let me get it started first. I will no doubt have questions. Thanks again!
Assigning only relevant vocabularies to some types
How can I ensure that vocabularies only appear as attributes for content objects when appropriate.
Say that I have a generic story object, but it needs to have a "sports oriented" taxonomy when being submitting to the sports section (term), but not when submitted to the religion section. How can I either exclude it when about religion, or include it when sports?
I realize i could create a bunch of unique content types for each parent section, but this seems grossly inefficient, and would only confuse content creators.