Here's the story, as a group project in school we have to create a database driven website. It was suggested by someone that we use drupal and one of my team mates jumped on - forget the fact that we'd never heard of it until then. I suppose I'm just looking for some reassurance that we can do this site the way we want in drupal, right now I keep thinking of the things we need it to and no idea how to go about them in drupal.
Basically it's a site for our campus. The home page would be an events page that would display any relevant college news, such as a closures, annoucments - perhaps a link to a calendar - this part seems easy. Users would then log into the site and be redirected to their own profile, menus would depend on the usertype (students, instructors, instructional coordinators, student council, etc).
Students should be able to view their weekly schedule for their current semester of their program as well as a booklist (and possibly a student job bank)
Instructor should be able to view class lists, workloads
Instructional coordinators should be able to create schedules, booklists and assign workloads.
(there are a few other things we would have liked to do but right now I'm trying to simplify things for us)
The things that's causing me headaches is the generation of content, where I'm not dealing directly with a database and mysql queries. Students are enrolled in programs which have semesters and each semester has courses which are taught by instructors which assigned to an instructor by the coordinator. I want to display all the students currently enrolled in a course assigned to an instructor, to return a schedule based on program and I can't even really figure out where to start in drupal.
Basically this boils down to me not really understand how to use drupal. Instead of creating a database, filling it with content and then querying it to get the results I need I now have drupal before me and have no idea how to create the same results. If there are any tutorials someone can link me to that would be great.
Comments
Its doable in Drupal, though
Its doable in Drupal, though not exactly a small task.
As a start you will want to assign roles to users (your user types).
I would then think in terms on content types, "student", event, course, etc. The Content Construction Kit (CCK) comes in handy here. Some add ons for it that would be useful are the date module, probably image field (and image cache) amoung other . You can relate content using node reference fields (there are also modules that help with relationships if needed) and user reference for relating content to users (for example user X is the instructor of course Y). Central to this is having a good plan of what the content types are and how they relate and how you want to display them.
Another useful module would be content profile and why I placed student in quotes, you may want a common profile type (lets call it 'profile', that covers all users (name, etc) and if useful you can add role specific content types. So everyone might have a 'profile' and for example instructors might have 'instructor' as an additional content profile type.
The views module is useful for listing content in a variety of ways. The calendar module adds view based calendars where you can list date related content.
^_^
Thanks for the quick response :D I don't feel like I'm drowning so much now in all the new information, it's hard to teach yourself a whole new way of doing things in month (and really, I've spend the better part of that month just avoid the project all together XD) And now I certainly have a clearer starting point. Thanks again!