By jhenry on

Searching through the forums for something on an ezine or issue-based content has so far proved fruitless, so I'll pose the question here:

Are there any mechanisms or modules to group sets of content (say, stored in flexinodes) into an issue node that would serve as a sort of frontpage or index to all of the flexinodes linked to it. I would want this frontpage to be able to grab all of the flexinodes of content type X associated with issue Y and put them in a box, similarly in another box I would want all of content type Z associated with issue Y in another box.

It would also be nice while adding content to always be dealing with content for a certain issue or have the ability to switch between issues.

Is there any machinery available that can do this sort of thing?

Comments

jhenry’s picture

jhenry commented

Or, I suppose if there is no built-in machinery or module that can handle that sort of thing, what would be the best way to go about adding it myself?

Dublin Drupaller’s picture

Dublin Drupaller commented

Hi Jhenry...

Try these: Sliced bread PHP snippets hanbook pages

The php snippets allows to "pull" content and put it in your main node page within a table layout or using divs.....If you know how to insert a HTML table into a page...you can paste the snippets into a cell or column...if you know what I mean...

So by using a few different snippets in the same page with Tables/Divs, you can get very funky with how you're information is displayed.

Hope that helps and if you do come up with any funky variations of some of the snippets already up there..please post it as it might be of use to others.

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

jhenry’s picture

jhenry commented

I don't have a problem putting code into a page or having a node display particular information, but grouping this information to be in a static content group (not something like last 5 articles of type X) doesn't seem to be supported out of the box.

I think what I may end up doing is to add an indexed field ('issue') to the node table in the database and require that to be set on any new content item.

(I just didn't want to have to modify the core drupal node code)

Dublin Drupaller’s picture

Dublin Drupaller commented

A few alternative ideas..

Out of the box ideas:

  1. You could create a category term called "Issue" and organise nodes under that? And/or use a snippet to display just those items in a content block in you're main page if the out of the box category browser options aren't good enough..
  2. Or use book pages using "issue" as the parent document and letting all others fall under that heading. And/or use snippets to display the main issue page, in a newspaper style layout.

Using Add-ons:

  1. Use flexinode.module to create your own node types....instead of hacking the node table

Worth considering...as I would tend to advise steering clear of hacking a fundamendtally essential table like node...and doing something else that won't have knock on effects or impact if you have to upgrade.

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

tag-1’s picture

tag-1 commented

Have you considered just creating a taxonomy with issue numbers?

I've used this before:

Issue:
- Jan
- Feb
- Mar
- etc.

and require each content type to choose one of those issue names/numbers/dates.

You can then write your queries to restrict results to those with desired issue, i.e. "give me X nodes with term 'news' and issue 'May'" for your May news items. Is that not what you're looking for?

tag-1’s picture

tag-1 commented

D'oh! I was too slow!

jhenry’s picture

jhenry commented

That might be reasonable, but there definitely needs to be an index added to the "name" field of the taxonomy list. I don't want to be searching an unindexed field over 600+ rows if I had 12 years worth of weekly issues.

One other thing that is a bit problematic about using taxonomy -- I am going to have 12 years worth of weekly issues in the list eventually when I import everything and the "issue" field can't really be populated automatically. This means that there's a dropdown with 600 items in it (and the one I want is at the bottom). When I create a new piece of material, it would be nice to be able to put it in the correct issue automatically.

If I can define a function taxonomy_issue_default() that returns the tid of the term that represents a particular issue, can I default that combobox?

Or at the very least, can I tell the categories to be ordered in reverse alpha so that the most recent is selected by default?