By mmatsoo on

I am in the process of creating my first real Drupal site and, to start, I am taking the "About Us" section from our current site and re-creating it in the new Drupal site. So I have a bunch of Drupal nodes including job postings, organisational structure, mission statement etc. and I have categorised them with vocabularies/terms using the Taxonomy module. Fine and dandy - the end result is that so far I have a bunch of "About Us" content.

Now I figure there should be an "About Us" page that displays and links the "About Us" content to the user.

So, my question about Views: should I create an "About Us" page using a View instead of content type Page? If so, then I imagine most of my other content navigational pages (ie. category or subcategory level pages) will also be Views. I just want to know if this is the right way to go.

I'm still very much wrapping my head around Drupal and I guess I'm stuck thinking of a View as a minor page element. (for instance, list of 5 most recent blog entries in the right sidebar) But can a view also be considered a full page's worth of content containing whatever text and lists you want to display? How do you guys use views?

I just want to avoid a situation where a year from now someone asks, "Why the heck did you build all those static pages for your categories and subcategories? You could have just used Views." Or alternatively, "Why the heck are you using all those Views? You should just have a bunch of Page content nodes." Or it's possible there's a better alternative...

Thanks,
Märt

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

Well in a way what you are dealing with is book pages, "About Us" would be a top level book and the associated pages children of it. That is of course one way to go. As for views vs static pages for navigation, I think it depends on a number of factors, how often you add/change the child pages and design considerations. Given that each of the sections is unique some how (for example content type or taxonomy) views makes it easy to produce and index page that reflects any changes to that part of the web site. Delete an existing page from "About Us" and it is no longer in the index, add an "About Us" page and it now shows on the index page. But if you want the index page to be more than a list of titles you are going to need at least some theming and possibly a static page depending on your needs.

mmatsoo’s picture

mmatsoo commented

Thanks for your response, I had forgotten about the Books module. I played with it a bit and I don't think it's quite what I want.

I'm starting to think that I'll just be creating a bunch of mainly static pages to represent the category/sub-category levels. I will pop views in where it makes sense but I want each category page to be its own sort of home page rather than a generic list of content belonging to it. I don't think Views gives me the design flexiblity to do that. (plus I can always embed a view in a page using php)

-Anti-’s picture

-Anti- commented

I'm just about to embark on adding my first content to my first drupal site too.
It's similar to your 'about' information; it's a school prospectus.

· Using the 'page' content type I will create 30 nodes, covering all the pages of the prospectus.
· The nodes will be 'flat' - no kind of heirarchy or links established between them.
· Each node will be labelled with the taxonomy term 'prospectus', but I'm not actually going to use it for anything.

· The prospectus' heirarchy will be created in the nav menu, using 'parent' and 'children' menu items.
· I'm using the excellent dhtml menu module: http://drupal.org/project/dhtml_menu to make navigation easier.

I also thought about using the book module, but I don't really like its navigation system very much.