Newbie question, creating a webstructure

I'm having the same problem. I've been reading everything about how to set it up with taxonomy and still not understanding how I can create it.

I want my home page to have 3 main categories with pictures and then when you click on those categories they will take you to 3 more categories for each (with pictures as well). And then finally those categories will have products under them.

I finally found the taxonomy image module and the taxonomy menu module, but still don't know how to create my site structure the way I want. I've looked at documentation and even found a category module, but it warns that it has a lot of bugs?? I don't want to add that to a live site. I'm so frustrated with something that I thought would be so obvious, that I'm ready to scrap drupal. Can someone please help me or direct me to some clear documentation on how to set up site directory?

Thanks,

jmmed

Drupal is all about classification through keywords or tags. It works differently than most other product out there.

In Drupal, all of your pieces of content are individual nodes. When you assign taxonomy to them then you can create structure out of those nodes and that builds your site. This is a little chaotic and I am new and don't quite have my head around it either yet.

Using your examples, each page could be a taxonomy term and you can add one or more nodes to those pages. Nodes can be articles, forms, images, or any other type of content setup in your installation.

For my own new site, I just created a taxonomy vocabulary with 6 category terms and then use a free-tagging vocabulary to use on articles because I am still not sure what terms I want them to choose from. However each tag would allow me to click on it and get a list of all the nodes assigned to that term.

These two links might help:
http://support.bryght.com/adminguide/categories
http://support.bryght.com/adminguide/create-taxonomy

There are several ways to accomplish this. Old thread http://drupal.org/node/31896 for some generic things (Note, 4.7 had flexinode, substitute cck and things have changed, still a good read)

First, with the exception of book module, content in Drupal has n o relationship to other content unless you create a relationship somehow. The only core way is through book module or taxonomy*.

So to get started.
Make sure path, contact module and menu module are enabled.
Create content .. Create your 4 pages, add content.
When you create each of the pages, look for URL Alias below the content body area and fill in the URL path you want. home about-us products contact
Make sure the promote to front page box is not checked.

goto Administer » Site configuration >> Site information and where it says Default front page: add the node/# for the home page. (using url alias home may work too.)

Also, you may want to create a new menu or add them to the default Primary links menu (Have to enable it in your theme for it to display).

So, you have your four pages... nice...
Now create your mission page and give it an alias
about-us/mission
rinse repeat

That will get you started. I strongly suggest you just setup a test site and play with it a while. Don't get attached to it, after a few days week or two when you are more familiar, then re-implement for real

_{* for various reasons references to taxonomy in 4.7 and previous was renamed to categories in v5. this was ultimately found to be more confusing and references returned to taxonomy in v6. There was also a contributed module called categories (DO NOT USE) which did some specialized things but had serious caveats and ultimately confused a lot of people)}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

Drupal can definitely do what you want so please don't give up. I remember facing exactly the same problem when I started out with Drupal - taxonomy, vocabularies, nodes - it all seemed a world away from the hierarchical sites that I was used to building with Dreamweaver or CMS's like CMS Made Simple.

The fact is that Drupal can be used for building structured hierarchical sites with structured content just as much as it can be used for building sites with more loosely structured content such as blogs or discussion forums.

For me it's the Swiss Army Knife of CMSs and I have yet to come across a site that can't be built using it.

So, where to start...

This did the job for me many moons ago:

1. Create your pages (Create content > Page)
2. Build a menu in primary links (Admin > Build > Menu), setting the paths of each menu item to pages you created in step 1

Use this to create the structure you describe. If you want to display the top level menu items across the top of the site and the other levels in the left navigator then use the Menu Trim module (v5 only).

Creating the structure in your pages can be achieved by:

1. Defining content types using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) which lets you add additional fields to a basic page or story content type
2. Controlling the rendering of the content using the display fields setting in the content type definition or amending existing templates in a theme or creating a new theme (PHP programming)
3. Using PHP directly in pages (e.g. I use this to display a contact form with contact details)

Panels (which you've already noted) can also be used but I've never used that module so can't comment further.

The last two very broad concepts are the ability to display content that is not tied to a menu item (e.g. a list of news articles) and the ability to display a block of information within the current page. That's handled by the Views module and blocks respectively. Taxonomy comes into play with views by helping you display related nodes in a list, i.e. those that match a certain term. Views, blocks and taxonomy work really nicely together and enable you, for example, to display content in a block on a page that's related to the page on the basis of how it's been tagged (e.g. a list of news articles related to the page).

The one weakness I've found with Drupal is around maintaining navigational context, e.g. displaying the top and left menu for a node that does not have an menu item. There are a number of modules that help in this respect, the simplest and most effective I found has been Node Breadcrumb.

Anyway, I could go on for hours about Drupal but hopefully what I've jotted down here is sufficient to help you find your feet.