By HansBKK on

I've done a lot of reading, and gathered a lot of different and sometimes conflicting bits and pieces. Now that I'm starting to actually prototype my site, I'm looking for feedback on basic structural foundation issues. First some background - it's pretty straightforward, so if you're impatient, feel free to skip to the question section below.

This is starting off as basically a standard "corporate brochure" site as outlined in the (now quite dated?) thread here: http://drupal.org/node/31896. The main top-level horizontal menu above the content area: Home - News - Calendar - Galleries (later: Forums - Blogs - Groups)

I'm adopting the idea of site content "sections" based on these top-level menu items, even if I don't use that particular module specifically (http://drupal.org/project/sections). Note that I want the navigation "paths" to mirror the URL ones, so all of the content delivered by the respective modules will be contained within the appropriate top-level directories: /news/ /calendar/ /galleries/ /forums/ /groups/) thus helping to orient the user between changes in the different look-and-feel and navigation interface within each area.

I'm considering having all the "static" content accessed via a vertical hierarchical menu in the left-sidebar. This menu will be visible from the front page, and from all pages reached by that menu. Furthermore, all these pages will be path'd under the top-level directory /about/, since they are all targeted towards people wanting to get descriptive information about the organisation and its staff/ facilities/ departments/ products & services etc.

I'm tempted to go with taxonomy-driven navigation from the beginning, but for now I think I'll use the core Menu system to start with. However, I do plan to use categories from the beginning, and appropriately tag both the Pages and Stories with terms from the same set of topic vocabularies.

I'm also tempted to use CCK and Views from the get-go, but I'll try to resist, using Pages for the relatively "static" content under /about/ and Stories for the event-based /news/ items.

Now (finally) some questions:

  • Q1 For those who are still with me (thank you!) what do you think? So far so good?
  • Q2 I of course want both my top and side nav links to show an "active" status style change in the menu trail. In playing with the latest stable v5 (May '08) I don't see that happening by default with either the Primary/Secondary menus, nor my custom left sidebar "about" nav. I perceive this as a bug to me, especially when the visitor arrived at a given location by actually clicking on the menu item - one shouldn't need to rely exclusively on breadcrumbs for nav path orientation. However, I'd also like to see the top-level (primary) link highlighted based on the URL path of the content, even if that link hadn't actually been clicked to get there (one of the reasons for my "sections" structure) Which of these approaches would you recommend, or is there an easier way? I realize some of these may only be relevant to a taxonomy-based navigation scheme:
  1. http://drupal.org/node/248522
  2. http://drupal.org/node/57960
  3. http://drupal.org/node/46020
  4. http://drupal.org/node/41349
  • Q3 I see that /node/ acts by default as the "front page" using the promote option. Can "promote" be set to send the items elsewhere, leaving /node/ available for me to use for my /news/ path?
  • Q4 If not, then how do I get a similar page for /news/ - teased Story nodes, but unfiltered by promote? I'd like the default opening view to show all Stories in reverse date order, but to also present an interface that allows the visitor to filter the nodes by either:
    1. terms, ideally with an intuitive interface allowing selecting multiple terms (OR)
    2. by date, ideally with a standard "blog archive" interface, either a GUI calendar or a hierarchical listing of year/months
    3. or (again ideally) by both factors: show me all "charity" items from December.
  • Q5 How can I have my relatively-static /about/ Pages display at the top of a given location (e.g. /about/charity) and then show the Stories tagged with the charity term underneath? If at all possible I don't want to have to use a strange parent URL above the term like /taxonomy/: if necessary I'm willing to have a look at using categories to control ALL the path/menu navigation.
  • Q6 As a refinement for those terms with so many nodes it's worth while, could I use the promote flag to show only the more important items on the "topic front page", while ALL of the terms' Stories would be available under /news/?

    • I'm guessing the answer to most of these questions is "CCK+Views", but I keep getting intimidated by postings about these modules, so I'm hoping there are simpler ways to achieve these goals. For example Article looks like one option for #5? http://drupal.org/project/article

    Thanks in advance for all your help - I plan to keep a detailed log and eventually post step-by-step howto/recipe doc once I've got the site the way I want it.

    ⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x