Posted by wernst on May 21, 2004 at 7:17pm
Sorry for the lame question, but here goes:
I have my own site (currently php-nuke, but converting over to Drupal, at http://www.warrenernst.com/). I post my thoughts on all sorts of things, and notices for my clients. I am the only contributer on my site. I like for my entries to appear on the home page, and then move down the page as they age.
Sounds like a blog. However, the Story node acts the same way, and it seems to simply stay at the front of the page, rather than being bogged down in the "Blog" heirarchy. In other words, the using the Story module seems simpler.
SO I figure I must not understand something fundamental about these two node types. What am I missing?
-Warr
Comments
Not much, actually, if you're
Not much, actually, if you're thinking in terminology and semantics only. A "story" is the the phrase newspapers use for a relevant entry in their newspaper. That same description/phrase can be used for an entry within a user's "blog".
The big difference between the two in Drupal isn't semantics, but rather, features. The "blog" module of Drupal can certainly be used by a single administrative user (instead of a "story"), but the key benefit of the "blog" module is that you can allow /any/ of your users to have/host a personal blog on your site as well. Because of this, the differences between "story" and "blog" become slightly clearer: administrators can post "stories" that appear on the main page of a community site, but the "blog" entries of underprivileged users may not be worthy enough for such an accolade.
http://disobey.com/
http://gamegrene.com/
http://www.disobey.com/
http://druplicon.info/
Not only that...
Not only that but the other difference I use to distinguish between the 2 are the content of each entry. A story, which I like to call Articles, are less personal and often less opinionated than a blog. A story would not be used for an update to your bad hair day. I would tend to write a blog entry for something like "Here's my opinion of this product" or "Here's how I got this piece of code to work."
Another good seperation is length. I like to keep my weblog entries pretty short and to the point. While a story would be more lengthly. If I go to someone's weblog and I have to scroll the page to read the whole thing, I think that's too long.
Of course, everyone has their own ways of distinguishing this. Some people use Drupal purely for weblogging. They don't care about stories at all. And that's a good approach if you feel the seperation between your weblog content and your article content just isn't that far from one another.
A good way to see some differences is to check out other sites that do weblogging and articles. One in particular is Java.net. There are links to the weblogs and links to articles on the left navigation pane. Take a look at some of those and you can kind of see the differences.
Hope that helps.
Both are nodes
Remember, everything in Drupal is pretty much based around the basic "node" type. For blog, you can choose to have certain members post to blogs. You can also choose to have certain members post stories. Stories don't live anywhere special, but you might set them up to be automatically promoted (there are default settings at /admin/node/settings where you can determine whether different content is automatically published, promoted, has comments turned on or off, etc.).
Also, since these are different kinds of nodes, you might also configure them with different types of taxonomy. Blogs might not even have taxonomy terms at all, whereas stories could be "Website News", "Travel", etc. etc.