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By cam.agent on
I've been playing with the software, Drupal, for a few months now. I really like the way it works, but I've been having trouble learning how to pull all of it together into something useful. A while back, a friend mentioned a project he'd love to see come around, and I noted it. I've decided to try and build up his project, modified, as a training tool on Drupal. Unfortunately, I think I'm missing some of the core concepts for using this kinda CMS.
ProjectThe project is for a Role Playing game thing a friend of mine plays. He pretty much just wanted to create a report submission system for administration, and I added a shitton of other stuff on top of it. I did this because I'm a big dumb jerk.
The reports system is, as far as I can tell, a workflow, a publishing queue, and an action. If a user wants permission to know a rumor, or learn a new power, or buy an encrusted finger of pointing +6; they just submit a report requesting said thing to their direct StoryTeller. Not too hard.
Other things I'm hoping to use is to create a private character 'book'. Thataway when a user writes a blog entry (or whatever kind of content) that is a story, they can tag it and automatically add it as an entry into their 'book'. I'd also like to see users able to add things from elsewhere on the site (a news entry on the aggregator, a post off a forum, etc) to their private book.
The ProblemWhat I'm having the biggest trouble with is the taxonomy system, or the CCK + Catagories module. Theres a knack to using these things that I just haven't learned yet.
Examples of how I'm thinking of this project:
If I create a new content type, called "Character Sheet", and made it into a container node type.. can I then have the characters stats and abilities listed as sub containers and subcategories in a way that the Character Sheet node compiles all the related sub nodes when it's viewed? This would mean that creating a new skill on the character sheet would involve creating a new node that is made child of the character sheet.
Or, do I just need to create a good Catagories system that contains every term that will appear on the character sheet and do it all on the actual content type (as generated by CCK).
Summary
Sorry about the ramble here, folks. I'm just hoping that someone will recognize some core misunderstanding that I've got about using taxonomies / Catagories, and maybe get a few suggestions on exact things that I should study on. The Drupal handbooks are pretty awesome, but I've been over them so many times and I'm just not finding the answers I seek. Also, anyone have an example of a system that really uses Drupal? I would LOVE to check one out and see "How it's done". I've also been studying over at the catagories module page and there seems to be a lot of functionallity there.... if I can just figure out how to put it all together.
Note: I am completely behind creating a mighty in-depth guide to what I'm working on as I go to submit to your docs pages. I take notes as I learn anyways. :)
Comments
Might help
Have a look at the new tutorial on using CCK nodes with the category module - this might be just what you need. Note that you currently need to apply this patch for some of the things in this tutorial to work (because of a bug in the Drupal forms API that isn't yet fixed).
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
That tutorial has been on my
That tutorial has been on my browser for two days, and I've run over it time and again. I see what it's doing... mechanically... but I'm still not grasping the theory behind it. At least, not well enough to apply what I'm doing in this tutorial elsewhere.
I keep thinking that a Container should be considered a node and the catagories serve as refrences to components of that node, but that doesn't seem to be right.
That patch is news to me, and I thank you for the heads up.