Hello!
I am pretty excited to be digging into Drupal for my latest project although I am finding it to have a bit of a steep learning curve (so much vocabulary to learn and understand!).
I am planning on building a site that is regional in nature and I want to offer two sides to the site - a community portion and an information portion. Basically I am looking to add the following features to the site:
User blogs
Forums
Directories
Articles
Calendars
User blogs would need to be approved - meaning only certain folks could apply to write about their neck of the woods.
Forums would be wide open
Directories would be business listings with several options for paid upgrades
Articles would be authored by approved writers only
Calendars would be added to publicly but moderated.
My question is really where does one start in getting something of this nature rolling? Because the site is regional there must be a drill-down (select a county then a city or select a city) to reach a destination then all the events (calendar), business listings (directory), articles and blogs (associated with the city) will be viewable.
I realize this is probably a rambling request - just looking for advice on how to set up a drupal site with these features that are all tied to a location (city).
thanks in advance for any help.
Comments
General Advice
Without knowing more about your site you may want to take a look at the user profile module (http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/profile). Using this module you could add any location specific information (e.g., address, city/state/zip) about a user that you wish. The Drupal DAL (http://api.drupal.org/api/group/database/6) will allow you to access that information later to tailor your content. This profile module is very generic and is pretty easy to get started with since it is widely supported (and therefore has a fair amount of supporting doucmentation).
Depending on your web development/PHP experience you will want to make sure you are familiar with the mechanics behind developing Drupal modules. While you can find most of the functionality you need for your site in user contributed modules -- it's very useful to understand modules in the event that you have to troubleshoot or customize functionality. If this is foreign to you than I would recommend picking up a reference text...http://www.drupalbook.com would be my top pick.
Happy developing -- although I am new to Drupal myself, it has been my experience that once you get started you will quickly realize the potential as a solid framework to build web apps.
Todd Krokowski
http://toddkrokowski.blogspot.com
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That sounds a lot like Coulee Region ONLINE, my community site for the La Crosse area. I use taxonomy to tag each piece of content with a community. I'm going to be using panels to create community pages that will show everything for that community, but haven't got to that point, yet.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
YES! You are pretty much
YES! You are pretty much right on target for where I am looking to go with this. The main page would feature articles on a monthly basis plus links to community (blogs, forums) and a drill-down for community-based "home" pages. So if the the city was "Smallville" then on the Smallville page would be all the content links for Smallville - business directory lsitings, resources, etc - including recent forum posts and blogs related to that community.
So you use taxonomy to tag your pages then (for example) select the term in the directory and only the listings with that tag get shown?
So happy to have found someone brewing a similar site using drupal!