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By cyc on
I manage Institute of Archaeology fresh site. I would like to include list of excavations, divided into years and places.
Facts:
- Excavations take place in/near towns/villages
- There can be more than one excavation site in each town / village
- Excavations on one site can last for more than one year (sometimes 5 or more)
- In each year, there is (or are) at least one archaeologist responsible for this season's excavations
Idea is:
I would like to have a few lists:
- List of towns / villages, incl. 3 parameters: province, county and town/vilage name
- List of provinces, listing counties / towns where excavations take (took) place
- List of counties, listing the province where it's situated, excavations leaded in the following years
- List of sites, each of them containing following years of excavations, described by: name of the site, town / village / county / province, years of excavations, archaeologists responsible
- List of archaelogists; each of them have should display years of their excavations on different sites. In the future, profile should include all this person activity: presence on conferences, publications etc.
- List of years; each should display excavations together with places/ sites/ archaeologists,
As you see, I need lots of relations..
Question is how to do achieve this. Is this a only method: creating a few content types and add several combinations / relations between geo / site / person / year?
For example, there could be 5 content types:
- archaeologist
- place (contains province & county fields, N+E pos, etc)
- excavation site/place (name of the excavation site with reference to place)
- excavation site/place/year (year with references to excavation site/place and archaelogists)
- Excavation (description of the exc. place, some image gallery, listing all years by reference to excavation site/place/year from above)
Is this a right approach?
I would appreciate all suggestions..
Comments
I would try this with 3
I would try this with 3 content types: archaeologist, location, and excavation with each containing the fields relevant to their topic. I would look at the http://drupal.org/project/location module for locations-- it integrates nicely with http://drupal.org/project/gmap to provide maps of your locations and/or excavations.
I would probably keep the nodeferences in the excavation content type-- add noderefence fields for archaeologist and location. You can also use http://drupal.org/project/nodereferrer fields on the archaeologist and location content types for easy access to the referring excavation.
Then add an imagefield for the images and taxonomy vocabulary for year to the excavation content type, and use views to create all the different listings you want. You may also wish to look at http://drupal.org/project/views_attach for easily listing the cross referenced nodes (ie excavations on the archaeologist content type, etc).
If archaeologists will also be registered users of the site you might want to consider using the http://drupal.org/project/content_profile module for their profiles.
Sounds like a fun project-- be sure to post back when you've completed it.
thanks for suggestions,
thanks for suggestions, however I still think 3 it's not enough:
- there may be more than one excavation site at one location
- there may be different (and more than one) archaeologists in following years
This means I have (?) to
- separate locations from excav. sites (and connect them via reference)
- have possibility to add different people in each year for each excav. site (not location)
_
I'm not sure I understand why there needs to be more than 3 content types-- nodereferences can be multiple values. Also, you can create multiple excavation nodes linked to the same location, no problem. Same with archaeologists-- you can make it a multivalue reference field.
To handle different people in each year for each excavation I think of 2 ways-- create new excavation nodes for different years, or use a combo field that combines the archaeologist with a year as a single field (available in cck v3, flexifield, or with custom code).
you are right with limiting
you are right with limiting number of content types; ockham's razor still rules;-)
I'm working on something similiar to your approach.
Is cck v3 stable enough?
Using 'year' field is also important for future features -it should help display / filter all archeologists activity (e.g. publications, conferences) divided into years.
I think of 3 possible solutions:
1. create separate content type for year
2. use CCK taxonomy http://drupal.org/project/content_taxonomy or another
3. create date (event?) field to store a year and then create custom year's calendar with all stored activities
how do you think?
_
ockham's razor FTW ;-)
I haven't had a chance to try out cck3 yet, but if I were doing this project I would definitely take it for a spin and check it out. It's the easiest solution and provides for forward compatibility.
As for year, keeping Fr Ockham in mind, I'd probably just go with creating an excavation node for each year. I just don't see 'year' as a content type (it's always been an attribute in my sites), but ymmv.
And don't worry about creating mashups or listings-- with views2, as long as you have the data somewhere in drupal, views can create a listing for it in just about any way you want.
Now you've got me really curious-- I think I'll have to load up cck3 and check this out.