By krio on

About five years ago I started a small news site, taught myself some php, built a home grown cms, etc. etc. Well, it grew to about 50,000 visitors a month and probably a thousand pages and now it is time to take it to the next level.

I think I can get my head around Drupal with some effort. Here is my question:

Is there a way to enter a name, article title, date published, etc and build a call on different pages that arranges the same data but in a different order?

IOW, I have a date index, subject index, and author index. Right now I populate those pages by hand (cut and paste). It gets tiresome. It was no problem when the site was small, but doesn't really work anymore. Is there a way to enter the data once, and then build, say, the subject index page so that the info is called into it and I don't have to hand code the info in?

I want to only enter the relevant data once (ie: author name, date published, subject category) on the posting page, and then have the index pages display that data in a specified order.

The only other way to do this it seems is to get into mysql programming, which I don't want to do. I'd rather do a site redo and start fresh leaving my old site as is, and build drupal along side it although to the reader it will appear seamless (I think and hope). I know Wordpress really well and don't want to hack it to the level that would be required.

Can this be done?

GK.

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

Name (author), article title and date published are all standard fields for node based content.

You can use taxonomy to categorize the content.

And by using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) you can add your own custom content types with fields specific to a given content type.

So with Drupal you can add content once and display in a variety of ways. With core, you can have content publish to the front page, with taxonomy each term has it's own listing and add the views module and you can list the content in all sorts of ways.

Note that with this approach there is no program and no need to under mysql.