Need help from Drupal veterans
Hi,
I am rebuilding my site from .NET to drupal, and I came up against an issue that I am not certain how to search for. So I thought I'd ask for help to see if someone can point my in the right direction.
The simple (hard to understand) description of what I am trying to achieve is to combine existing site content into topics (not tagging as the purpose behind it is different).
The verbose (easier to understand) description is let's say I have 10 posted stories on the site. If I determine that 4 of them are on exact same topic, I (only the admin) want to go through the backend, and create a topic by specifying the name of it, then select from a list of available stories on the site, and create it. Once someone on the site clicks on the topic, they will see the 4 related stories.
The reason why tags won't work is because they are not exact - let's say I have 10 articles labeled as cars, but only 4 of those stories are actually related to the same topic of 100mpg 0-60 in 3.2 seconds Hummer - chances of those 4 articles being labeled the same way are slim. Plus, I want to be able to tie in other links to the same topic - so let's say I found 3 other links on the Internet on the same wonder Hummer - I want to bring them into the same topic as well, and they will obviously not be tagged.
I know this will involve modifications of existing code, but I was thinking about using 'book' as the basis, and adding the rest of the functionality later (sorry, I am not a developer at all - I will actually task my development team with doing it). But is 'book' the right basis for this? Is there anything that would be closer in functionality that will not involve as much customization? What are your thoughts on this?
Any help will be appreciated and I thank you in advance for it.
Well since you see this as
Well since you see this as an admin task how about using the node queuemodule? For the external content create a content type for "external links".
Thanks!
I will definitely look some more into that.
Would CCK be appropriate to use for something like this or is that an overkill?
I am not sure what you mean
I am not sure what you mean by "CCK be appropriate to use for something like this", appropriate for what? CCK could be used to create content types that need more than a title and body. It could also be used to make a content type that has a title and allows for multiple nodes reference fields. You could then add one of these types for each "list" and reference the nodes needed.
Taxonomy and Aggregator
I think some combination of taxonomy and aggregator (both in core) might accomplish what you need here.
As for categorizing your topics, the tagging you DON'T want is the user tagging, or free-tagging... which is only one possible use for taxonomy. By default, this is disabled, and you can have a more controlled process by which you as admin can log in and categorize content via taxonomies set up by you, again, as admin.
And with the aggregator I'll give you an example of how I use it: I go to a search engine (e.g. google news) and search for a very specific news topic... work out a highly-tailored search query that returns the kinds of results I want, then grab the RSS feed for that exact search and plug it into the drupal aggregator on my site. Furthermore, I use aggregator categories like "News" and "Bury", so to complete the flow of news items appearing on my site, I have to *approve* an aggregator entry (search result) as "News", or just bury it by checking the "Bury" category if it happens to be a false positive.
hth