By Anonymous (not verified) on

Folks,

I've been doing some reading and searching on the forums but to avail.

I want to replicate the current structure on my website created through static HTML pages (faqshop.com) but I'm really struggling on a couple of points I could do with some help on if someone has time please.

Best way to organise content
I want to create structure along the lines of:

Product
..|- Category (e.g. Design & Planning, Installation and Configuration, Troubleshooting, etc.) with items grouped under each heading like SMS 2003
......|- Subcategory sorted alphabetically with teasers e.g. Site Server Installation
..........|- Articles containing the information e.g. Can I Run SMS 2003 on an NT 4.0 Server?

What I'm struggling to get to grips with (and this is fundamental to my design), is the best way of going about it. Should I create a Book for each Product and then link in articles? Would I be better off creating a Vocabulary for each product instead OR would something like the FAQ Module better suit my requirements? As the content of the Category page is hardly going to change (other than me adding new categories) would I better of creating this as a Page, with a Story created for each Subcategory and a Page for the actual Article itself?

Organisation and being to able to navigate easily and find the information is key for me.

Only the Latest Item submitted to the Front Page
I want to be able to change the front page so rather than items getting published like they do on a Blog (everything in together, most recent first), I want to be able to create areas for each product containing the latest article for that product (like on my current home page). I'm guessing blocks are going to have something to do with this.

Many thanks for reading.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

kimadactyl’s picture

kimadactyl commented

You can do everything you describe with the book module. Creating a teaser list inside a book hierarchy could be a little tricky though, you'd be best off doing everything within book if you can, it's designed for making hierarchical data.

Also worth having a look at views if you've not already.

zirvap’s picture

zirvap commented

I haven't tried the FAQ module, but both book and taxonomy would fit your needs. The main difference is how the navigation works. In a book you get automatic links to next and previous page, as well as pages directly above and below in the hierarchy. (See the handbooks here for an example.)

Taxonomy, on the other hand, makes it easy to pull related content from all parts of the site. Clicking on a term named "Backup and recovery" could pull up http://www.faqshop.com/sms2003/designplan/dbuprec.htm, http://www.faqshop.com/sms/smsbupre.htm and so on.

I suggest you try out both of them, to see which one fits your needs best. Maybe you might find you want both: Book for the hierarchy, and taxonomy to supplement it.

As for only the latest item submitted to the front page: Like dar-es-balat mentioned, http://drupal.org/project/views is your friend.

--
I'm using my sig to mention my own, open support request: Node reference + node profile: How to list all nodes which refer to a user's node profile?. I'd be grateful for any pointers.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Thanks for the replies folks, I'll check them out.

I've been playing with Books and they seem to fit the bill. One "problem" I've found though is that by default you can't include the Teaser of an article on a page.

For example I want a page containing the titles of all of the related articles with teasers and when you click on the title it takes you to the full article. At the moment all I can get is the article title and not the teaser. If anyone knows how to overcome please post here otherwise it's on the ever expanding "to look at" list.

kimadactyl’s picture

kimadactyl commented

This is exactly the sort of thing you need Views for :)

miarrobino’s picture

miarrobino commented

Guess this is too late for Cliff, but maybe useful to someone else who has a similar need. Node Hierarchy (http://drupal.org/project/nodehierarchy) lets you create hierarchy similar to books and lets you define the view that is used to display the children. There are 2 default views provided. One is a simple list and the other is a list with teasers. It's pretty easy to create different views, say to show the children as a table with custom CCK fields. NH also works with any content type. The downside is you don't have the prev/up/next navigation that book provides.

I think it would be nice to see Book enhanced to allow you to use a custom view or turn off/modify the navigation links, without having to write PHP code.