By pan69 on

Hi guys. Sorry if this has been asked before, I just can't seem to find the right answer.

I'm building this product site. On this site the products are divided into categories and even categories can be sub-divided into sub-categories. So far I've been using Node Hierarchy to create the structure for my site. Its been working alright but I've been running into small issues with it from day one (some bugs in the admin interface and the fact that there is only a single to many relationship).

I'm starting to wonder if there is another (maybe better) way of doing things. For my site it's important that the structure is agile (manageable) and that the order of content can be (easily) be defined. E.g. it must be possible to order content manually not just ascending or descending on node title.

I was wondering if taxonomy with Views would be able to do the trick. I'm just not sure how to go about this. At the moment I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm slowly starting to hack functionality into my site and that there must be a better way of doing things.

Any help and input is very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Luke

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

I'm not really clear on the details of your hierarchy, but you most definitely can do this with taxonomy and views because my sites are organized that way and I've never even tried nodehierarchy ;-)

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

pan69’s picture

pan69 commented

Thanks for that. Do you happen to know of any (good) tutorials that discuss this approach?

Thanks,
Luke

PS: Before I forget. How do you do the manual sorting? E.g. on a certain day I want to promote a product to the top of the list.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

just setup your vocabularies to reflect your hierarchy (i like to use the hierarchical_select module for hierarchical vocabularies), then use views to create the pages that display lists of your node in any order you wish. Also, for random lists of nodes without a specific criteria (like your random promoted product above) you can use the nodequeue module. Some good videos on views are:

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

pan69’s picture

pan69 commented

Thats really useful. When working with taxonomy, have you run into issues with the breadcrumb by any chance? When I create my categories and products and have autopath assign the proper url, the breadcrumb doesn't seem to follow those rules.

Thanks,
Luke

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

do you mean when setting up the paths with views? I did have problems with the breadcrumbs at first-- you just need to specify a general page title for the view and then a page title for each argument (there's a field for specifying the the title).

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

pan69’s picture

pan69 commented

Got it all sorted now. Not sure what I did to fix it :)

Thanks again.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

excellent-- you're welcome ;-)

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz