By cosfo on

I am evaluating Drupal for a website that is in the design phase. I have a few questions about the appropriate use of Druapl for content and having content that is dynamic and "context aware" for all blocks on a page. Let me provide an example:

Let's say the site is about travel. Content is broken up by State and City. I have several types of content for each State and City.
- Overview and Basic Information about the State or City (Standard HTML pages for each city.)
- Hotels in each City
- Restaurants in each City
- Points of Interest in each City
- Transportation in each City
- Etc.

Then under each of those, such as Restaurants, there would be a list of restaurants. Choosing a specific restaurant would take the user to a page about the restaurant, which provides basic information, review, google map and user reviews / comments.

Hotels would act in a similar manner, but for the content type of Hotels.

Okay, so my questions - please be patient with my "Newbie-ness". Also, I am not looking for free consulting here, just want to know if I'm barking up the right tree.

1) Can Drupal handle the different types of content pages and the related navigation?
2) Are there tools for importing the data into the CMS system?
3) Context Aware Content:

Let's say on the a city page for "San Francisco" I have blocks that list "Hotels on Sale This Weekend" and another block with "Car Rental Sales". Let's say both content types are provided via a web service or syndication from a host, where I need only provide the "City".

Can I develop a "block" that automatically configures itself to get the correct data for each city that the user brings up?

So the page that is presented pull up the "City Overview" content for "San Francisco", and all the blocks configure themselves to pull up information for "San Francisco".

Does this make sense?

Cheers!

Comments

CnnmnSchnpps’s picture

CnnmnSchnpps commented

For your first question - I think that if you created a custom module that defined the content types Hotel, Restaurant, etc. and then made a taxonomy vocabulary something like

CA
- San Francisco
- L.A.
NY
- New York

etc

The taxonomy listing would show items for each city or state, and you can customize the output to get what you want.

As for the second question - any info that can be grabbed via PHP can be output inside of a block. I suggest that you cache this kind of info locally, then synchronize it with the remote site every 10 page requests/10 minutes or something,

cosfo’s picture

cosfo commented

thanks for the response. i knew that developing and using a taxonomy would handle the content tagging. i suppose that since a block can contain php code and since i can have modules created, that that should really solve the issue.

what i am trying to avoid is having to manage hundreds of "blocks" with each doing esentially the same thing, but for different cities.

thanks again for the reply.