I'm trying to come up with a site design for a friend that I thought Joomla would work perfect for. Once I started though, I found out it wouldn't. I looked at Drupal, and it sounded like it was better made for what we needed.
Without going into too many details, it's going to to about, and for, students, and volunteers, traveling in Europe, Asia, etc. The site users, who will be the travelers, need to be able to have detailed profiles showing their area of interests and expertise. They will be able to post short travel stories, and blog entries that are categorized by what region they're traveling in. We want the users to be able to interact one on one in different formats (forums, PMs). See news feeds from the region of choice. There will be more later, but that gives the general idea.
My problem is I'm now a bit pressed for time, and I read most of the guides, but I still can't seem to grasp how to organize the categories, sub-categories, Content Types, vocabulary, terms, taxonomy, etc. I've tried several test setups, but none seem to work right. the idea is each user will be directly related to the region they are staying in, so I thought the main categories/vocabulary would be the region names (Europe, Asia, etc.). Under that would be static page of general info about that region. Articles and blogs would also go under each region that they are based on.
I understand the "how" for setting these things up, I just can't figure out the structure of it all that will end up a nice organized menu system.
By the way, the reason I chose Drupal for now was the other CMS won't allow me to have complete control of what each user is allowed to do and see. Also no blog feature.
Thanks in advance.
Comments
One potential way...
Hi wxman,
It's hard to really say how to set it up, without knowing exactly how you envisage you're site. But Drupal is pretty much flexible enough to do anything.
From what you've said it sounds like you perhaps want to set up a vocabulary called Country (or Countries), under which you can have terms for each actual country. If you want to get more fine grained you could make the top level terms general regions (Asia, Europe etc) and then have sub-categories for actual countries in those regions.
You could use these categories to manage user driven content, such as blog stories etc. This would allow visitors to browse around by region and view content from users related to those regions, using the built in taxonomy views.
For the pages for each region that are created by you (the more static pages) you can just create these as Pages, and you don't even need to put them in the taxonomy. You could just manually create a path based heirarchy like www.yoursite.com/asia, www.yoursite.com/asia/japan.
That's just one way of potentially setting it up, hope it's of some help. :)
Hi
Hi
That's a help, thanks.
I had that sort of thing in mind to begin with. I think what's messing me up, is the terms themselves. I look at something called a category as the main section, which I would probably set to be a region, like Europe. Sub-sections would come under that for the static pages, travel essays, blogs, etc. It's when you start throwing things like Content Types, vocabulary, terms, and taxonomy along with it that got me mixed up.
I think what we would like, is someone traveling in Europe, for example, be able to log on, and click the Europe main menu link. From there they can read essays from others traveling in the same region, or add one of their own. They will also have a blog for themselves too. We would also be able to select interesting essays on occasion to make front page material. I don't think I want the essay or blog writers to be able to make their own taxonomy, so I'm guessing I need to pe set that all up, and have them select from it. I would think that allowing everyone to be able to set their own terms, would make a very confusing navigation system. This thought is based on my observation that the menu items come from vocabulary, and terms.
One other thing. I haven't so far found a good article on how to set up detailed user profiles yet. We're going to need the users to have info about not only themselves, but where they've visited as well. This is so others, going to a new area, can contact users that have been there already. If anybody knows a good one, please let me know.
I'm looking at the add on modules, and I have to wonder if I made a mistake choosing version 6.1? A great many of the ones I see that would be a big help go with version 5.x.
Thanks again.
I think a good way to get
I think a good way to get your head around taxonomy is to step back and make sure you're only using one vocabulary for one thing.
So you could have a "Countries" vocabulary, as well as (random example, maybe not a good one) a "Reviews type" vocabulary. Which might contain terms like "Restaurant reviews", "City reviews", "Transport reviews". This vocab might be limited to nodes of the type "Journal entry", while the Countries vocab might not be limited.
This would mean when it came time to make a journal entry for a restaurant review in Paris, you could select Paris from the countries vocab and restaurant reviews from the Reviews type vocab. From there, it is easy to use the views module to make a view that filters for Journal entries with the Paris term and the Restaurant reviews term.
I think what I'm trying to get across is that Taxonomy is best for organising your content into categories, and that from there you can use the Views module etc to present that content.
Hi half-brick I think that
Hi half-brick
I think that give me a better idea now of hoe the structure works. I'll try it using Regions as a vocabulary, and go from there. At this point, I just keep trying different ways, then delete it all and try it a different way. Eventually it will all fall together.
I also asked in my last post about the version I picked. I installed version 6.1, but I noticed quite a few modules that would be perfect, but they were all for the previous version. Several even looked like they had no plans for a beta for the new version of Drupal. Should we be trying 5.x instead?