By jontheil@gmail.com on

I considered for a while creating a number of sites based on something like LAMP. But for sites where the content to some degree should be editable by the customer/end user, some kind of CMS seems to be the most logical solution. After looking around, I decided to try Drupal, since it seems like a rather mature project.
People wrote that this CMS has a steep learning curve, and I certainly agree..;-)

I have made a test site (in Danish) for a shop selling stuff in a lot of categories. And after reading a lot in the documentation and the forums, I decided to use categories, terms and vocabulary to make a hierarchal stucture for the content and for the navigation.

Maybe I haven't fully understood the concept of this approach - or it migth not be the rigth approach at all. When the user clicks on one of the major categories in the menu, they should see a single page with some introduction to the category. As it works now, the will see all the contents of all the subcategories (or terms with must be the rigth expression).

Is there a simple solution to this? Or is the taxonomy concept not useable for my case?

You are more than welcome to visit the preliminary site at http://cms.mfl.dk

Comments

ghankstef’s picture

ghankstef commented

These posts have part of the answer. I have figured out how to show just the nodes (eliminating the sub-terms) see: http://drupal.org/node/27227

Also related see:
http://drupal.org/node/25867

The Taxonomy Context module let's you show a summary of a category (http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_context) but also shows subterms and nodes:

Taxonomy context
For organizational websites one often wants to display information like a title and summary of the current section. The taxonomy_context module enables you to do this through taxonomy terms, displaying the title and description of the current term, a "breadcrumb" trail of the current taxonomy term and any parent terms, and titles and descriptions of any sub-terms of the current term (similar in format to the listing of nodes in a term). The module also includes a context-sensitive menu block for each vocabulary.

jontheil@gmail.com’s picture

jontheil@gmail.com commented

I'm not really a php expert - hope to be it some day ;-) - so I will start having a look at the taxonomy_context module. Obviously, the "problem" is that what I want to do is not exactely what Drupal was made for from the beginning. But I have the feeling that a lot of people out there wish to use Drupal making sites with a traditional way of navigating and still enjoing the advanced and flexible functions of the CMS.
Thanks for the help so far!

ghankstef’s picture

ghankstef commented

I have a solution and will write a post when I have more time (may be a day or 2)

Here is the short version

1. Install Taxonomy Context and Php template

2. In Administer -> Settings -> Taxonomy Context set "Show subterm info:" to disabled

3. Add a summary description for each term under Administer -> Categories
This will be your description of each category

4. Set up your template as follows (a bit involved bear with me). You must use PhpTemplate

page.tpl.php

<?php
// include header section
require_once('header.tpl.php');

if (arg(0)=="taxonomy") {
include('taxonomy.tpl.php');
}
else {
include('node.tpl.php');
}
// include footer section
require_once('footer.tpl.php');
?>

header.tpl.php

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="<?php print $language ?>" xml:lang="<?php print $language ?>">
<head>
<title>
<?php print $title ?>
</title>
<meta content="text/css" http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" /><?php print $head ?><?php print $styles ?>
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrappa">
<div id="content" style="padding-left: 8px;">
<div id="rightCol" style="float:right;">

<?php print $sidebar_right ?>

</div>

<?php if ($tabs != ""): ?>
<?php print $tabs ?>
<?php endif; ?>

<?php if ($search_box): ?>
<form action="<?php print url("search") ?>" method="post">
<div id="search">
<input class="form-text" type="text" size="15" value="" name="keys" /><input class="form-submit" type="submit" value="<?php print t("Search")?>" />
</div>
</form>
<?php endif; ?>

taxonomy.tpl.php

<p id="help"><?php print $help ?></p>

node.tpl.php

<?php print($content) ?>

footer.tpl.php

</div><!-- Select --><!-- No Content Area Menu -->
<!-- Select (content_area_menu) --><!-- MetaTag -->

</div><!-- END "contentArea" -->
<div id="primaryNav">
<div class="backBrwn">
<!-- ========================================================================================================= --><!-- SEARCH ================================================================================================== --><!-- ========================================================================================================= -->
<form action="http://www.hamline.edu/cgi-bin/htdig/htsearch" id="search" method="post">
<h2>
Search Hamline
</h2><input type="text" name="words" class="txtField" /> <input type="hidden" value="collage_law" name="config" /><input width="16" height="12" border="0" type="image" alt="GO" src="../shared/images/homepage/law/go.gif" />
</form><!-- Select (top_left_menu) -->

<div id="cap">
 
</div>

<?php
$menu = menu_get_menu();
foreach($menu["items"][0]["children"] as $k) {
if ($menu["items"][$k]["title"] == "Primary") {
$mid = $k;
}
}
print theme('menu_tree', $mid); ?>
<?php print $sidebar_left ?>
</div>

</div><!-- END "wrappa" -->

</body>
</html>

Obviously your html will vary with your theme

Feel free to contact me here http://drupal.org/user/20376/contact with questions.

I will watch this thread also