Pagination is an important aspect to the usability of my site and I need to know the best method for achieving it. The book module seems to have a lot of the structure I would like to use, but its default paging menu at the bottom of each node isn't satisfactory because it requires you to return to the initial page to get a full contents listing or go through each page in a linear fashion until you reach your goal. The story content type also seems like a possibility but requires page break tags inside the body content in order to paginate(afaik) and I need to paginate between separate nodes with their own fields and such.
Here's an image to give you an idea of what I need to achieve.
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/8918/layout03ce8.gif
The book module seems like the most appropriate starting place. Is this configurable without programming or are there existing modules that already achieve this? I searched quite a bit for the appropriate information but it doesn't seem like a very popular topic with the people who have the knowhow(a bit curious to me as its a VERY standard navigation style).
Comments
... It can't be that
... It can't be that difficult of an issue seeing that the search pages already do it. Will i need to hire some one to do this? Its an important issue, so if you're reading this and don't want to write a complete answer, you could just say whether or not its best left to paid services as i have no php programming skill myself.
"The book module seems to
Book sounds like what you're after. It's hard to guess from your diagram, but I imagine you are wanting the "Secondary links" to always display the current table of contents of the resource being navigated then? Otherwise just having a span of numbers at the bottom to describe future pages isn't much different/better when trying to just to a specific page.
I have a feeling might want to explore Drupal's menu capabilities with the book module a bit. You can place a book (and it's pages) into a menu and have the menu "expand" with subpages when the book is being navigated. That won't remove the way book module does it's navigation at the bottom, but there are ways to do that via programming, css, etc if you really wanted.
As a simple example, here is book on Drupal.org opened to the first page of a first chapter. You'll see the menu on the left displays all the book pages in that chapter as you navigate:
http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/install
Of course that menu doesn't have to be on the side, or look like that, or be a link list, or even have page titles if you wanted to use numbers for some reason.
Have you looked at book navigation block?
Have you looked at book navigation block on the block page? I faced a similar problem and after a lot of searching for a solution I have settled for it.
Thanks for the responses
Thanks for the responses guys, I can see that the diagram probably just caused confusion rather than helping. The secondary links are not a problem, I have that part under control. The difficulty I'm having is related to the paging navigation at the bottom of nodes found within a book. By default the book module uses something that looks like this at the bottom of each node:
‹Page1 UP Page2›
That would be fine, except for the fact that it only allows you to select the next page and the previous page. I need to find a way to insert a list of all pages in the book, represented by numbers, into that paging nav at the bottom of each node. The paging module provides exactly this for all node types, but the major problem there is that it breaks up the content of a SINGLE node into several pages when I need it to connect individual nodes like books do. Essentially I need to find a way to modify the books paging system to look like this instead:
«first ‹previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 next› last»
lol, hopefully that makes more sense.
Have you thought about
Have you thought about trying to use the custom pagers module in some way?
- Corey