Cross-reference different content types using Taxonomy
I have the following requirement: I have created a website with different content types (say Book pages and custom CCK nodes). The two types of content use the same Taxonomy vocabulary. When I am in one content type, I would like to display a menu (ideally in a block) for the other content type that uses the same term in the vocabulary -- does anyone have any ideas on how to do that simply?
This example illustrates my problem: Say my site is about music; I sell CD's (each CD will be a CCK node) and publish articles about various musical subjects (which will be book pages). Everything is arranged in a Vocabulary like this:
1) 18th Century
2) 19th Century
3) 20th Century
-- 3a) Classical
-- 3b) Rock
-- 3c) Jazz, etc.
When someone is looking at a Duke Ellington CD, I would like to display a block that links to articles on 20th Century Jazz. And vice-versa, when they are looking at Jazz articles, I would like to display a block that links to the directory of Jazz CD's.
I've searched the forums and not found anything, but I know there must be an easy way to do this -- it seems logical that Taxonomy was designed with this problem in mind.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks.
=-=
check out the views.moudle to create custom DB queries and create your lists for blocks and the like.
After that you will use block visibilitity to control where these blocks are shown.
_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )
I have used Views,
I have used Views, specifically to create a view for the Administrator to view all content according to the Vocabulary tree. So I see your point about creating a block and then using visibility to control when the block is exposed. What I do not understand is how to get the block to display the same branch (as a menu) of the vocabulary tree.
My vocabulary has a lot of terms, so I would like to do more than just display the whole vocabulary in the block. In my example, when the user is viewing a Duke Ellington CD, I would like to make it simple for him to go to Book pages about Jazz -- by having the menu targeted to open at >>Jazz.
Sorry if I am being dense . . . and I very much appreciate your response!
..\/..
Views seems like the way to go for sure.
There are probably several ways to accomplish this - but at two ends of the spectrum...
1) Manually - create a view for each possible term (block) and manually enable the blocks for each page where they are to be shown. Advantages: simple to implement, easy to understand. Disadvantages: Tedious; Unwieldy & hard to update/maintain if there are a large number of terms and/or nodes.
2) Fully automated - create two block views (one to show articles, one to show CD's), each with a term argument. In the argument handling code, you'll want to check if you are viewing the opposite node type (e.g., in the view to show articles, the view only applies if path is a CD node), and then use the node id, arg(1), to look-up the term and set the View argument (search drupal.org for "context sensitive view" for some examples). Now you've got the two block views that you want, that show the list of the opposite node-type, with the matching term supplied as an argument to the view so it can filter.
Use a snippet of PHP for each block visibility to return true for the correct node-types, false otherwise.
Advantages: you do not need to do any additional work when you add a new Article or CD node - it will just work. Disadvantages: complex to set-up correctly; requires some PHP coding.
(NOTE: this design is right off the top of my head - I have not considered the problem carefully - it is only meant as an example.)
There are doubtless many variations in between. Your problem is a very neat application - it would be surprising if someone hadn't done exactly this type of thing before... hopefully they'll see your post here and give you a clearer path. If not, and you need some help, you can contact me.
good luck.
Block containing related content . . .
Thank you vm. I had considered changing the coding, I do php, but have not figured out Drupal yet. I figured there must be a way to do this in Drupal.
I'll search per your suggestion, if I find anything or end up doing it myself, I will post here.
Another thought occurred to me, if anyone out there has experience . . .
When you look at a news site (say the NY Times), and you are reading an article in a particular section (say Sports), there will be a Block with links to related stories (or stories which "People who read this article also read these articles . . .") Obviously, there is a filter to display those related stories.
Has anyone done that in Drupal??? How have you implemented it?
Thanks.
=-=
Multiple ways to take care of something of that nature. How they are doing it exactly I can't say, but
There are related "type" modules in the downloads area:
http://drupal.org/project/relativity
http://drupal.org/project/user_related_content
http://drupal.org/project/relatedlinks
There are also snippets http://drupal.org/node/65375 with views
and http://drupal.org/node/76923 which can be put in a block
a documented method = http://drupal.org/node/134320
_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )
I will check it all out; I
I will check it all out; I also found the Similar Nodes module (http://drupal.org/project/similarnodes).
I knew Drupal had solved this problem!