Hello! I've been seriously troubled by the Drupal way of navigating trough a website. Altough I fully understand the advantage of taxonomies, I secretly wish that Drupal had a more tree-like way of navigating / content saving. I think that probably has to do with the site that I’m building: it will not be a community site / weblog, but more a ‘standard’ corporate site with fixed menu items and little articles.
The site that I’m currently building needs to have the following (translated and minimized) menu / tree structure:
- Home
> News
- Managed Services
> List of services
> Advantages
- Custom work
- General information
> Who we are
> Contact information
On the Home page, I would like to show a nice introduction with text and a photo. Additionally, I would like to display a ‘quicklist’ of the most recent newsitems (which would be articles I think) IN the page (not a block). Under ‘News’, the full list of newsitems should be visible, and of course the newsitems would be clickable so that the visitor can read the entire article.
I want the ‘List of services’-page to have an introduction text, and a list of services (articles? pages?) that I offer. I guess I should create a taxonomy which maps articles to service-categories or something. But how do I display that list into the ‘List of services’ page?
‘Who we are’ should display a nice text explaining the background of the website, and a little text of Person 1 and Person 2. Clicking on the header or some other link should bring the visitor to detailed information about the selected Person.
I’ve currently tried the taxonomy_content and other menu-generation modules. All seem to be not exactly what I’m looking for. For example, I would like to map individual pages to terms (like ‘Who we are’), so that clicking that item doesn’t generate a page with a list of the child-items under that term, but that it displays a page called ‘Who we are’. Next, a side menu should be visible only showing the child-pages like Person 1 and Person 2. How would I do that?
The reason for me to work with Drupal and not with Mambo, Typo3 and other systems that are imho easier to understand when you are looking for a strict tree-based content management solution, is because I like Drupal with it's modular design (very very much!) and the 'easy' interface (in contrast with for example Typo3). So: I prefer Dupal! :-)
However, as you’ve probably understood by now, the sites I develop are mainly just static pages with tree-like structures. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to configure Drupal in such a way that it acts more like a 'strict' content management system? I've got the feeling that the internal structure is very well able to handle this. There are of course some modules that assist in achieving this (like the sitemenu module), but they still don't create the tree-like 'feeling'. I understand that you think that Drupal should be mainly community oriented, but there are so much similarities in the requirements of both when looking at a CMS..! I might be missing things, but as an average user, I've been having serious problems with this..
Comments
Some tricks
This won't get you everything, but a lot.
You can create a custom front page many different ways. Front_page module, a conditional at the head of your page.tpl.php, or a node you create and point to in admin/settings. Look in the handbook for code snippets you can use to create custom dynamic lists and displays. Some new ones have been added in the past couple of days.
The books heirarchy is available in a sidebar block. Having it show only the child pages would be a hack, or a custom block. Hiding display of the child pages in the node itself you can do with CSS. (I think it would be ".book {display:none;}".)
Many of the modules can display taxonomy in a tree-like structure. Be sure to look at the others there, especialy "taxonomy foo", as they tend to have features not listed in the releases page blurb.
I hope these help.
.:| Laura • pingV |:.
_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
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Hello Laura. I've already installed the front_page module, and I'm beginning to understand that fetching the latest articles (or another special news-type node) will require some custom coding. I searched in the Handbook, but couldn't find the code snippets that you pointed to. Can you tell me in which section they would be?
I don't want to use the Book module actually; just regular 'pages'.
I know there are quite some modules that can create tree-like structures. I think I'll need to modify one to my (so is seems) special needs..
recent news articles...
Hi Eyos,
To answer you're first question...if you setup categoreis or taxonomys to organise you're list of links...you'll find it so much easier. I found it hard to get to get to grips initially with the taxonomy concepts, but, once sussed it is invaluable for building something intuitive and easy to navigate.
in many respects I would say it is vital. there are a clump of taxonomy_something.modules in the downloads area that may help..but, it's still worth spending some time working out how to get them setup.
With reference to your home page where you are putting a list of recent news items, recommend you check out the Sliced Bread Snippets handbook pages.
I need to do something similar recently on the front page of a site and it was simply pasting together a few snippets and putting them into a HTML table.
i.e. the (main) node page looked like this
!--------------!-------------!
!--------------!-------------!
!------site----!--upcoming---!
!----mission---!---events----!
!--------------!-------------!
!--------------!-------------!
!--------------!-------------!
!----recent news entries ----!
!--------------!-------------!
!--------------!-------------!
There are a number of ways of doing the news items, I simply used the snippet to display the most recent 5 entries of a certain blog as the "news blog". If that makes sense.
Hope that helps..
Dub
Dublin DRUPALLER
___________________________________________________
A drupal user by chance and a dubliner by sheer luck.
Using Drupal to help build Artist & Band web communities.
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
Reply
Dublin DRUPALLER, thanks as well for your reply! The code snippet to extract newsitems from the database is indeed what I was looking for. In combination with the front_page module gives it the right result.
The navigation issue still remains, unfortunately. I think the big problem is that it's not possible to define a 'default' node for a term. In my case, I don't want to list all the nodes that are children of a term. Instead, I would like to 'switch' to a per-term default node. (I'm hoping you understand what I mean here...). But I guess this is a custom coding thing, right?
The taxonomy_context menu could be of use, If I was able to configure the order in which the nodes under the terms were displayed in the menu. Any tips on that?
try book pages..
Try this...not sure if it's a "best practice" but it's simple to get started with..
About Us
- custom work
- general information
- contact details
- advantages
and so on...
Hope that makes sense and helps you get started...
I stand corrected, but, I think the taxonomy_context menu module has a "related links" type block that is populated depending on which page you are looking at and how you have your taxobnomies/categories setup.
the "order" thing you're reffering to is determined by the term WEIGHT which you set in either ADMINISTER ->> CATEGORIES or when editing the page. can't remember which, but it's the WEIGHT that determines in which order things appear in a list.
Dub
DUBLIN DRUPALLER
___________________________________________________
A drupal user by chance and a dubliner by sheer luck.
Using Drupal to help build Artist & Band web communities.
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
Reply
Hello again. Thanks for your reply. I've configured the Taxonomy_context module in my site and I actually quite like the result. I would like to show you the result, but... for some reason, the context menu isn't visible for anonymous users! The block header is shown (Navigatie in my case), but no links are displayed. When you're a registered user and propperly logged in, the function does work. Any idea's? I already checked that the custom visibility settings for the 'Context for Navigatie' block is 'Users cannot control whether or not they see this block'.
Another thing is that I can't influence on the order of the nodes appearing in the context block. But maybe I can explain that more easily if I could show you what I mean..
taxonomy_menu
I am having a lot of luck with taxonomy_menu.
How to:
Go to amin > categories
Add a vocabulary called "menu" or whatever. This won't be displayed.
Make sure your choose heirarchy=multiple I would check required too.
Add terms to be the menu items you wish. Make sure you do this in advance.**
Go to admin > menus
Add your own menu. Call it whatever you want to be displayed in the resulting block.
Move your taxonomy to the menu by clicking edit next to your vocabulary and select the new parent to be the menu you just created.
Disable the taxonomy term in your new menu. The other items (terms) will be displayed as a list.
Enable the menu in admin > blocks
**There's some sort of bug that will not display terms added after you move the vocab to your custom menu.
I'v found this method to be very flexible. So now when you add a page, you select the term from the menu and it's inserted.
Clear as mud? Let me know if this is what you're looking for or if you want more details.
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Hey Jo1ene. What exactly do you mean with:
"Move your taxonomy to the menu by clicking edit next to your vocabulary and select the new parent to be the menu you just created."
Where do I do this? On the taxonomies-page? As far as I can see, I can't select the newly created menu to be the parent of the taxonomy. Or am I not completely understanding you?
clarification
No. admin > menus
First you "add vocabulary" in admin > categories
Populate your vocab with "add terms" to create the list you would like displayed in your menu.
The taxonomy_module by default, puts your vocabulary terms in the main navigation menu.
So you go into admin > menus and find your tax vocab in the list. There will be the word "edit" in parens. Click edit and on the next page is a dropdown choice for "parent item". From that dropdown, choose the menu that you added. You have to "add menu" first, of course.
Better?
try this - it really helped me
hi eyos,
At first I got the Drupal methodology and saw the power of its structure, then as I started building my website I went back to traditional thinking. By traditional thinking, I mean looking at things from a module perspective. Sort’a like looking at a cgi module, ok this cgi module does this and these are my tools. If you look at it from a module point of view I believe you’re going to be very unhappy… it’s all about taxonomy. My site was really looking trashy and I was frustrated and grumpy with my structure - I couldn't find stuff, couldn’t get to certain posted nodes data with ease and the more I added the worse it became.
This posting helped me very much and perhaps it can help you
http://drupal.org/node/23096
I hope this helps you - don't give up …. it’s about taxonomy and that is a learning experience or should I say re-training experience
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