By idontknowtheanswer on

I've been looking at Drupal for some time now and it looks very impressive (I'm using 5.7 until more modules are migrated to 6). I've read a number of the case studies and trawled through the help and tried to get my head around how to structure a site but I haven't quite grasped a key concept. I think http://reviews.cnet.com/ is probably a good example of the variable structure that I'm aiming for.

By "variable" I mean that each review type has page with different layout and content. For example "Internet Access" shows a page with a broadband provider lookup widget and then a list of articles relating to tips and tricks to tune broadband. If I click on "MP3 players" that takes me to a page that has a list of player reviews and is very different in layout and content to the "Internet Access" site.

What I'd really appreciate is some guidance as how best to achieve this: should I be creating node templates for each content type, do I customise block\view output based on content type, is taxonomy the way to go? Is there another way to achieve it?

This seems like a fairly standard requirement for something like Drupal but I've failed miserably to find any kind of consistent guidance on how to achieve it which surprises me. Any help would be really appreciated.

TIA.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

kaffeen’s picture

kaffeen commented

I would suggest doing some more research. Your basically talking about designing a website. There are alot of components to such a task. It takes a whole book to understand these concepts. One I highly recommend is..

Pro Drupal Development

Also, since you probably will want to play with Ajax, another good book...

JQuery In Action

I bought these two books and they are both very good.

If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are. ~ Zen Proverb

idontknowtheanswer’s picture

idontknowtheanswer commented

Indeed, I've designed a few sites in the past. I know what it entails from a design perspective. What I don't really get is the recommended way to achieve what I'm after in Drupal.

I've read Pro Drupal Development and whilst I found it a useful book I didn't really glean the information I was after to achieve the variable, layered site structure I want - which is a fairly typical site layout.

Thanks for taking the time to reply but I've already read a lot of this sites documentation, the case studies, trawled through the forums, gone through the books and searched google extensively. I don't want someone to give me war and peace on how to achieve this, just a list of bullet points would be great on the modules to use and or\approach they'd take.

For a starter for 10 I can see that I can achieve the desired result with a node template per content type but I don't think this approach scales well with a large number of content types. Alternatively I could have a single content type and template, use taxonomy to categorise an article then use PHP in the template to render the appropriate content based on a taxonomy term - but it strikes me that I'll end up with an unwiedly template with masses of inline PHP. Then there's the "right" way that I'm hoping someone can guide me towards.... :-)

TIA.

idontknowtheanswer’s picture

idontknowtheanswer commented

In case anyone's interested in this I think I found the answer(s) to this here: http://drupal.org/node/45944

If anyone has any opinion on the best approach from this selection that would be great.

TIA.