By PSPerkins on

Greetings!

I am new to Drupal, and I must say, I am enthralled with the ease of most aspects of theming for Drupal.

I am kind of a "newb" to PHP, but I know enough to get myself in trouble, and to know when I am over my head.
I built a site on my test server in PHP and I am trying to migrate the site to Drupal 5.6 for ease of administration and security, etc as my PHP is not so great yet and administration is a daunting task.

My question is this:

I understand that taxonomy terms can be used to sort data through a link.
I have made each of the links in my custom nav area sort the data by taxonomy term, which is not complicated, and I can make that part work. But what I would like, is if in the sidebar I could fashion a block menu that displayed only those results which matched the category as well. i.e. if the category is "about me" then the sidebar menu would only display links to posts filed under that category. Then, if user clicks "services" it loads a new page with similar behaviors - sidebar showing only recent posts which match that category. So, "services" page would only show "services" posts in sidebar and etcetera.

I have been beating myself over the head for a couple days now trying to figure it out, and it's probably simpler than I expect. I tried using a couple different taxonomy modules, but they are awfully obtuse and I can't seem to make it work.

Any tips, ideas, or links to existing modules that would work for this?

I can post a link to the skeleton of the site where I wrote the PHP/MySQL to make this work for me outside of Drupal environment, if it would help to understand what I am asking.

Thanks for your time.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

A) update to Drupal 5.11 you are 5 security and bug fix releases behind
B) investigate the views.module or the relative content module or relativity module. The name of the exact module slips by me at moment but I know there is one.

PSPerkins’s picture

PSPerkins commented

I am using Drupal version 5.6.

Site was conceptualized outside of Drupal.

I have tried the node relativity module, and the custom views module (what does all that stuff mean?) but it is very obtuse as well, and disappointingly difficult to configure.

I am sorry if I am an annoying newbie, I just thought that there was something simple that I was missing. This was not hard to write in php - I assigned each link an id, then built a simple php switch where each "case" includes the appropriate file in the sidebar according to id passed through url. In drupal this simple action seems to be very complex and I was hoping for a simple answer.

I understand if it's not a simple answer...I will continue messing with stuff until I figure it out I guess.

The site where I am using this (not built in drupal)

http://www.extrasensorydesign.com

Thanks for your help.

mdlueck’s picture

mdlueck commented

For one client we wrestled through three implementations of site navigation / taxonomy.

What we arrived at we actually implemented for one site: http://self-helpsoftware.com/

We build the menu system "by hand"

It calls taxonomy queries ( http://drupal.org/node/299 and look for "Using categories in menus" )

The taxonomy queries we hide with URL aliases as the URL needs to stay static (and have search engine friendly munchies) where the query might change over time.

For their larger site with many hundreds of pages this is the navigation system and queries search for multiple taxonomy tags... A + B + C

Best of all, arrived at what I had envisioned creating before I ever knew of Drupal or Taxonomy... and did not need to write even one line of PHP code to do it!!!

PSPerkins’s picture

PSPerkins commented

Thanks for your response.
However, it seems that the best I can do with this so far is to have all of the categories show up in every sidebar - I can't see where I can limit the listings in the menu block to the specified category.

Here is what I did, step by step, maybe someone could point out where I am botching this?

1. Created custom menu under header with links "about me" and "services" - this works fine
2. Went to taxonomy and created a vocabulary named "category"
3. Added terms "about me" and "services" to vocabulary
4. went to custom menu under header and gave links corresponding values "about me" was taxonomy/term/22 , etc (these sort the content just fine)
5. Created another menu for the sidebar named "Articles:"
6. added item "about me" to menu "articles" and set it's parent to articles
7. Set the path of about me to node/22
8. went to blocks and put "Articles" into left sidebar.
9. Repeated steps 6-8 using "services" and setting path respectively

Both of the menus are working fine, even the sidebar menu, the problem is they all show up on every page. When I click the "services" tab, the sidebar still shows "about me" post as well as "services" posts when I want it to only show "services"

I am obviously missing something simple, or maybe not.

Thanks to all who have responded. I appreciate your help.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

If i understand you correctly, I would do this either with a custom block (similar to http://drupal.org/node/63859) or a views block with an argument for the term of the current node (note-- block views require php argument handling code to get the correct functionality).

===
"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." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz

PSPerkins’s picture

PSPerkins commented

Sorry guys. I figured it out and it makes me feel dumb. Thanks for letting me use your forum to think it out, I guess.

I can post my solution, if you'd like, but I think I may blog it as well!

It's much simpler than I was making it...when I read through what I did, I saw what was wrong, and now it's very easy.

I heart Drupal.

webengr’s picture

webengr commented

"I can post my solution, if you'd like, but I think I may blog it as well!"

Well at least put a link on this thread to your solution.....

BTW, update, its not fun to be hacked...

PSPerkins’s picture

PSPerkins commented

I was going to test my solution a bit and see how to adapt it better suit my needs - experiment with it a bit more, but to boil it down, what I did was:

1. Make the top links into "Pages" by creating an "about me" page and a "services" page.
2. I linked these top links to the corresponding nodes of the pages created (though linking them to taxonomy terms sounds more fun)
3. I made a separate menu for "about me" and "services" and enabled them both in the left sidebar under "blocks" section.
4. Then in blocks section I configured them each to only appear on certain pages by clicking the appropriate radio box and entering the node again of the pages the categories correspond to.

I am still messing with how to make the links show the info I want and go where I want, so I will be sure to post a link to my blog entry when I get it all figured out, and the drupalized version of my skeleton site.

"BTW, update, its not fun to be hacked..."

Thanks for your concern. I will update to the latest version when I am about to go live with the project. Right now it is in a test environment on my machine and I can't be troubled to update in middle of a project - though I certainly will as I plan on working with Drupal more and more. Very fun!