I've played with Drupal for a few day now and don't seem to be getting it.
The content (page, story, blog) doesn't seem to be placeable on any page within the website ... for example, if I have a paragraph on a page (split between teaser and main body) I might want to place it in a blog, as a page heading, and included in a wiki. Seems as though Drupal wants me to recreate all my content in blocks before it can be displayed?
Does Drupal allow this? I have thousands of pieces of content that I would like to arrange and rearrange in many fashions across many pages in a website. My excel database has essentially all the content on one sheet, numbered. It is then layed out by page ... so when I go to page 35 I know all the numbers of all the content pieces, and how they fit together on page 35.
Perhaps someone could give me some search terms or links to help me disentangle how drupal might handle this? The buzz for drupal led me to believe it could handle this, but three days of struggle is leading me to think it's just buzz.
Thx
Comments
Usual answer
CCK, Views, Panels.
Some elaboration
All content management systems assume that you have content that can be divided into collections that are structurally identical. For example: All blog posts are structurally identical. All records in an address book are structurally identical. Drupal has some basic core support for multiple content types of differing structure. CCK (Content Construction Kit) lets you create new content types of arbitrary complexity with whatever fields you wish.
Once you've created the necessary structural definitions (content types) you can import your legacy data using any of a number of tools that you can find in the contributed modules collection.
The core system provides several ways to display sets of data (lists of headlines, for example) selected from sets of content. To make more, install the Views module, which lets you define database queries and create page components such as blocks, without writing any code.
The Panels module lets you create pages with any sort of layout you like, pulling in data from content or components created using Views.
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sounds to me like you want to create your own list views. which you can do with the views.module
beyond that taxonomy.module allows you to organize and categorize your content by "tagging" it.
Thanks, lots to work with
had never heard of panels ... something new to check out.
CCK seems like overkill ... the simple page content screen is enough (text is text)
never got views to work ... will give it another try.
idea is i put out a paragraph ... users comment on it in various formats (forums, wiki's, blogs, interest groups, comments, case studies) that place the paragraph in various contextual settings. For example, one paragraph is on the best use of competition in a research setting.
These all get reviewed, scrubbed and a new paragraph is placed out for future changes ... looking to build a community that essentially writes the book on the topic in an iterative fashion. But the core piece of content is the paragraph and all its revisions (across all the modules). It's like a wiki on steroids. [this is a very simplified version of the intent of the website]
Again, thx for the prompt replies.
Keith
views...
Views is an amazing module, once you play with it a while and get your "aha!" moment.
I wouldn't think of starting a site without it.
~silverwing
Indeed. No drupal without
Indeed.
No drupal without views :)
organization of Drupal content
When/if you are ready to explore Views and CCK, I suggest the excellent articles at www.lullabot.com (a top Drupal developer) and their book "Using Drupal" (http://www.usingdrupal.com/). And before I forget, "blocks" are just a placeholder for content on the page layout ("theme") - blocks do not store content; that's done in "node"s (the atomic content type in Drupal).
*BUT* I don't think you need to worry about CCK and Views yet. It sounds like your first step might be to arrange each paragraph as a node and tie them together with the "Book module" (http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/book - note that this web page is itself part of a "book"). The "book" is unique to Drupal, and one of the two main reasons I use it versus other CMS. NOTE that the "print" function in the book module will assemble all "child" nodes of the page from which you call print, into a single (long) web page formatted for printing (or for easier reading than clicking through paragraph node by paragraph node).
Once you have the basic page hierarchy, then you can start to tag individual nodes using taxonomy (http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy), and then quickly assemble all nodes with a given tag into a nice list using Views (even without CKK). Taxonomy is not unique to Drupal, but is far more powerful than most other CMS and is the 2nd reason I chose Drupal.
But a problem with one paragraph per node is that it will get tedious to have to navigate node by node for editing (as noted, viewing can be facilitated through the book module's print function). So a final, but more complicated, option is to put several paragraphs in each node, and add a wiki-style table of contents at the node level.
For an example, check my own site: http://orpdrupal.cc.uregina.ca/drupal/node/208
Note that my site is very much a work in progress, but we are *using* it as we build it, modeled upon:
http://imagexmedia.com/blog/2008/6/corporate-client-staff-manual-wiki-style
Also, your statement "For example, one paragraph is on the best use of competition in a research setting" leads me to think we might have a shared interest re content. The website to which I just pointed you to as a book/wiki example is from my day job, but I am also pursuing a parttime PhD in innovation studies. Do you have a description available of the larger project for which you are exploring Drupal, and could you send it to me via my gmail: kfortowsky@gmail.com
You need a beginner book
Your operative term here is "I've played with Drupal for a few day now and don't seem to be getting it."
A few days won't cut it - I can assure you Drupal is not just buzz. Go buy one of the getting started with Drupal books.
Go learn how to install Drupal locally so you have a test system. Then start playing around with creating your own content types. Then learn to use views to access your new content types and display these content types the way you would like. Then explore what the taxonomy functions can do for you.
These forums (in my experience) are best used for specific problems that have specific solutions so as you explore feel free to post your questions here.
One nice thing once you get going I think you'll come to see the real power and enabling tool that Drupal can be Figure about a month of your time to really get somewhere but in days you can achieve some very nice aha moments that will keep you going.
For starters go get a LAMP(*nix), MAMP (Max OS) or WAMP (windows) stack to set up on your local system then install Drupal - alternatively use the Acquia-Drupal installation. Acquia provides more flexibility to set up test drupal installations so the stack maybe the easiest.
If you already have done that then time to experiment with creating your own content types. This will necessarily involve you getting familiar with CCK - a 3rd party module and a very important one. GO download it and start playing.
Enjoy!