Hiya guys, it's my first post on the forums, and I'm quite interested in moving to Drupal for a few reasons.. Its simplicity is quite attractive, but I'm kind of put off because it doesn't seem quite as powerful as I'd hope.
One of the most important things that I'm looking for is a way to effectively sort the content of my website. Eventually I know that I'm going to have to manage a large number of articles, and my users need to be able to search/browse/find articles quickly and easily. Articles should be sortable by different parameters (alphabetical, category of article, date of post, rating, popularity, etc)..
Also, I'd like to be able to "recommend" different articles to people on my front page. Recommended articles could be based on those same parameters (rating, popularity, etc.)
I know I'm being pretty vague, but I really just need a good way to organize/categorize my articles. I looked at the Drupal demo and it doesn't really seem to have any of the functionality I'm looking for (it doesnt seem to allow you to sort articles/content AT ALL. It just sorts by date of post :/) but I'm sure there's a way to get the functionality I'm looking for. It seems like a pretty basic need :p
Anywhooo, hopefully someone can point me in the right direction :p
Thanks in advance!
Comments
Drupal and Drupal Contrib
By itself a Drupal installation gives you a basic submit content, view stream of content on front page with taxonomy (categorization), and view content specifically (node). Much of the versatility of Drupal comes from the contributions to Drupal: modules.
One of the ways to extend content is to build more complex content types via CCK which allow you to include other types of content within a node (like images, references to nodes or users, locations, etc... based on other contrib modules).
One of the ways to view data is with Views, which enables you to create pages, blocks, feeds, and other types of views that display fields in various forms (table, list, unformatted, slideshow, etc...). You can include filters, sorting, arguments, and relationships to other types of views to create versatile queries of content on your site. You can expose these filters to create a faceted search (useful for lists).
Lastly there's a whole category of modules for content rating and recommendation, which you can browse to see what might be more suitable for your article site.
Many modules communicate data back to Views so that you can add filters, displays, fields, styles, etc...
The modules download listing is a pretty poor way of searching right now after the d.o d6 upgrade. I would stick with using drupal or google search with terms like "content recommendation" or "node recommendation".
Recommendation
Hi Fishbulb,
I absolutely advise you to move to Drupal. I don't think that Drupal is the simpliest CMS Framework out there, but do think it is the most powerful. Drupal is based on a modular architecture, so you install different modules according to your or your project's needs. Probably what you tested on the demo site was a default Drupal instalation running the core modules, but there are hundreds of contributed modules that as stated before, you can install according to your needs.
Here are a couple of links that can be helpful:
http://www.vimeo.com/979664?pg=embed&sec=979664 here is a list of newspapers and magazines running on Drupal http://groups.drupal.org/node/5100
this could be a good starting point http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal
Upon closer inspection, these are loafers.
Cool, thanks for the input guys! I've looked around a little bit more and I think that Drupal just might suit my needs for this project, I'm gonna get something up and running and test it out.
Definitely looking forward to it!
^_^
Alrighty, so I've played around with Drupal for awhile, and it's definitely allowed me to streamline everything. I like it alot! I've got everything I need except for ONE THING.
Basically, I need to be able to add custom fields to all of my content pages. By default, you can really only put in a "Title", "Tags", and the "Body" of the article.. I'd like to add other fields into that.
This picture illustrates what I'm looking to do:
http://drupal.org/files/images/active_tags_after.thumbnail.gif
(Look at the "Style" and "Genre" fields.)
Thanks for your help guys. I know there's probably a module out there that lets me do this (or maybe even functionality built right into drupal) but I havent been able to locate it.
CCK
As I suggested, CCK allows you to create custom content fields for each content type. There are many contributed modules for CCK that allow you to add different types of fields displayed in a variety of ways.
Thanks ^_^
Wow, thank you! haha, I guess I should have just opened my eyes a bit.
The only problem I'm having now is that CCK has a tendency to create hideous pages.
This module does almost exactly what I need it to do: http://drupal.org/project/contemplate
However, I don't know PHP and I was hoping for something a bit easier to use?
Thanks again for your help :p
One thing that may help
One thing that may help design CCK content pages is to add a fieldset to the fields you add. This should help group them when viewing the node too.
You should be okay just knowing something like
<div class="mytitle"><?php print $node->title; ?></div>orprint $node->field_myfieldname;. If you get a white screen, it means you did something wrong ;-).Hmm.. Yeahh.. Unless I put in
Hmm.. Yeahh.. Unless I put in a really significant amount of time to learn PHP, I'm not really sure how much customization I'll be able to get out of that. Are there any alternatives?
Found the solution.. buut..
Sorry for the dirty double post!
I found my solution in the Panels module, however I've come to find that you can't yet use CCK fields in your panels.
I found this ticket:
http://drupal.org/node/414298#comment-1406306
and I was wondering if maybe anyone had made any progress since the last comments?
You could create a view with
You could create a view with your content fields and then add the view as a panel pane?
In reality my cleanest solution is to modify node-contenttype.tpl.php and customize how I want the html and php variables to be laid out, but that requires some php and drupal knowledge.
Don't recommend Panels for D6 at this point
While I expect it will eventually get to a production-stable state, I have personally found Panels 3 to be too unstable for use on d6 at this point (April 2009). Panels 2 on d6 is a dead-end after, I think, Alpha 2. If your production application is at all critical, I don't recommend it.
OTOH, if you enjoy playing with dangerously powerful machines, Panels 3 might just be your thing. You can use it to completely restructure the entire Drupal experience, if you're of a mind.
If you're working in D5, Panels 2 is great. Go over to the Sony MyPlay website to see what they've done with it there. (I think they're using Panels 2...maybe an earlier version....)