By rp7 on

I just can't wrap my head around this. Say I have the usual site with a lot of static pages (the usual informative pages), divided up into several categories. For example, this is how a structure could look like as well as the navigational part:

- Home
- About
---- History
---- Management
---- Figures
- Services
---- Service A
---- Service B
---- Service C
- Products
---- Product A
-------- Reviews
-------- Technical Information
---- Product B
-------- Reviews
-------- Technical Information
---- Product C
-------- Reviews
-------- Technical Information
- Contact
---- Location
---- People

What is the best practice within Drupal for organizing the above diagram? Each page is of content type 'Page'. Do we use Books? Taxonomy? How are we creating the menu? Breadcrumbs?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

tarfeather’s picture

tarfeather commented

For what it's worth here's my newbie take on this:

The top sections (About, Services, Products, ...) get "Primary links" status.
These also become 'parent' to the second level (e.g. Service A, Service B, ...)
Same approach for the third level.

Lay-out wise:
- the links to the top sections could for example appear top right of your site screen.
- the Primary links block goes into the left margin where it can be expanded to the lower level sections.

Taxonomy: I figure it couldn't hurt to start out with a simple vocabulary with the names of the top sections. I hope it'll prove useful to categorize the lower level using this.

Hope this helps some as a start. I hope your post will get replies from more knowledgeable people here. I for one am going to read along.

rp7’s picture

rp7 commented

Thanks for your input. Not much to read along so far unfortunately.

Hopes some experienced people can shed some light on this!

Drupalace-1’s picture

Drupalace-1 commented

RaF007: I could be wrong, depending on my understanding of what you're looking to achieve, but I would suggest:

1) If each of the items in your outline is to be a page, and you want a ready-made outline of links built on that structure, a Book seems a good idea. Each page doesn't need to be the Book Page content type; it can be a regular Page or Story or other content type, and still placed within a Book (which I believe you know). By doing so, Drupal will automatically create navigation links among the pages, as well as a block to navigate the whole Book. I suppose I'd do that, as I can't think of a reason not to take advantage of those features.

2) Breadcrumbs are another, separate option. I'd add them too, if for no other reason than "why not?". (Also, most themes will place the Book nav links below the content, and breadcrumbs above the content; the two together should make for convenient navigation.)

3) Building a Vocabulary with nested Terms, per your outline, may not be useful if you're not looking to create lists or otherwise do anything interesting with those Terms. That is, if the page Service A is just going to be a single page, then giving it a Term "Service A" doesn't particularly enable anything interesting that I can think of.

4) That said, giving the nodes broader, more functional Terms could be useful. If Service A, Service B, Service C, etc. each shared a Term "service", that would enable you to make a list (block, page, whatever) of all those Services. If each Reviews page shared a term "review", you could make a special page or block listing all reviews. Such special lists might not be needed in your outline right now, but they could prove handy organizational options down the road, as a complement to your Book structure.

I hope some of that is helpful –