Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
By Fidelis on
Following an interest expressed earlier, I just finished reading the first part (on drupal) of "Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress" by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little and Jared W. Smith. I was really impressed, by the book and by drupal. The book went a long way in giving me confidence to try Drupal - I will use it for http://www.gov20.info
Here are a few things that I was looking for and found out in the book (you can find my questions after):
- The blog and trackback modules - together with comments, seem to turn drupal into a full-featured blogging platform;
- Running multiple drupal web sites off the same installation (pp. 190 and following);
- Forum module - turning drupal into a very decent forum platform (maybe not phpBB but enough for my needs);
- The simple, step-by-step installation explanation;
- The short, well-presented explanation on basic drupal features - themes, blocks, modules, nodes, comments and taxonomy;
- Etc...
One thing I did not find out is how well drupal books compare with wikis, say MediaWiki, on the following:
- Can some kind of syntax be used to easily refer to other pages in the book? Such as brackets, i.e.
[[book page title]]? - Does drupal allow the creation of links to book pages that are not yet created? Would the link show up in a different color (in red in MediaWiki for example)? Would there be a place to see all missing pages, and orphaned pages?
- How many level deep (chapters, sections, subsections...) can drupal books realistically handle?
- Can an entire book, or selected pages of the book, produce RSS feeds?
- Can an entire book be turned into a printer-friendly manual?
- The book I read ("Building Online Communities...") says that a log message can be entered for moderators and fellow book editors. I guess this is similar to the MediaWiki "History" tab, except that comparisons between two different versions cannot be made?
That's pretty much the last questions on my mind before I plan the site and installation. Oh, and in case anybody knows this, I would be interested in seeing a drupal web site featuring several user blogs - drupal.org does not seem to have any (that I can see)...
Thanks -
Comments
A little off topic
There is a wiki module in development for drupal.
------------------------------------------------------
Be Smart, Think Free, Choose OpenSource
Off Topic??
Off Topic??
I haven't used book pages
I haven't used book pages much, but here are answers to some of your questions:
Several, I would think, although I don't think it follows the typical pattern of chapters, sections etc. If you visit drupal.org/handbooks, you can see for yourself that the books are several levels deep.
Yes, it can, although I remember reading that there have been some problems lately. May have been rectified by now. With some opensource magic, you can also convert the book pages into downloadable pdf files as puregin.org has done with the drupal handbooks.
There has been some excellent work done with node revisions for 4.7 and they will probably apply to book pages too. I don't know if you can actually see the differences visually. I think it is more like each revision is stored as a separate copy.
Not sure about the RSS feeds.
Communal blogging
http://www.blufftontoday.com/
http://blogs.savannahnow.com/
http://blogs.augusta.com/
And a host of others.
Drupal supports URLs that access individual weblogs, communitywide aggregate views, and (through taxonomies) topical views.
Drupal Blogging
That's great - I understand how Drupal accesses individual blogs, aggregate views and topical views; this all seems to be based on "personal" blogs. Can Drupal enable one (or several) multi-user blog? For example, one blog for the whole community to which only selected users can post? Maybe by defining a new type of content with the flexinode module, called "site blog post" (?) or by systematically reserving (through permissions) the use of the content type "stories" for this purpose? What if I want to enable blogs for organic groups? Is there any other way to do this than by assigning a category to blog posts corresponding to a virtual distinct blog and accessing this blog through taxonomy terms?
I'm currently planning the content architecture of http://www.gov20.info and these questions are bugging me right now...
patrick
multi-user blog
You could use the story or page modules for the the multi-user blog and still have individual blogs. Flexinode would be another option.
Printer friendly output is a
Printer friendly output is a permissions of book module
There is a place in book module to see 'orphaned' pages.
There is a diff module for 4.6 that is not feature rich, I believe there is plans to update for 4.7 http://drupal.org/project/diff
See http://wiki.bryght.com/wiki/wiki-recipe-for-wiki-module for a 4.6 recipe.
Your best bet is actually to explore the Liquid module http://drupal.org/node/53517
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
creation of links to book pages
You can use the freelinking module to do this.