By Kardboard on

Hello all!

I'm really new to Drupal, and PHP CMS and all that stuff altogether. I'm trying to convert a normal HTML site to a Drupal-based design, but I'm having a very hard time trying to piece things together. And add to that I'll have to convert the whole thing to Chinese. The current site is here.

There are 4 main sections (at the top) that are continually updated with articles and lists of audio files, while there are 6 static, stand-alone pages (bottom). The navigation's a bit wonky, but I didn't make the current site. :P

I've made a theme for Drupal, but the middle (content) table tends to extend beyond the screen in the administer pages. Anyone know why? Here's the current Drupal test site.

I'm totally confused by this taxonomy thing, and I have no idea how to integrate the existing site hierarchy into Drupal. Any help will be much appreciated! Thanks!

Comments

Steven’s picture

Steven commented

Please read this to prevent problems in the future. You should not switch to Big5, unless you know Drupal well:

http://drupal.org/book/view/8408

Your HTML header still contains a Big5 content-type which could confuse browsers.

Kardboard’s picture

Kardboard commented

Great tip! Thanks for letting me know.

But what of the other things?

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Well, to start with, you should realize that you don't *need* the taxonomy for anything. A couple modules (image.module for example) require it, and forums work better if you've assigned a taxonomy to them, but taxonomies are otherwise not mandatory.

They are, however, extremely useful. New Drupal users often wonder how they can make their own navigation menus. The menu.module lets you define a taxonomy that then gets translated into a navigation menu. Taxonomies help organize your image galleries, your forums, your blog topics, articles etc. Use taxonomies whenever you have more than one kind of something: blogs about politics, blogs about religion, blogs about China etc. This is a task for taxonomies. Once you have a taxonomy attached to your blogs, you can have pages that list just blogs about China. Or you can have an image gallery with just images of apples, or stories about oranges. That's the basic idea.

If you're having problems setting up and using taxonomies, please ask specific questions.

cheers,

Robert Douglass

- Robert Douglass

-----
visit me at www.robshouse.net

Kardboard’s picture

Kardboard commented

Thanks for the tip.

There wouldn't happen to be a forum for brand new users to get their bearings with Drupal would there? Drupal is a great platform, but some of the concepts seem rather confusing. Maybe it's just because of big words like "taxonomy" :P.

Maybe someone can point me to a tutorial on how to use Drupal? That'd be much appreciated.

Prometheus6’s picture

Prometheus6 commented

http://drupal.org/book/view/1

Fact is, I expected to ask a lot more questions than I've had to. I've bookmarked the documentation and find it and the source code to be all I need.

Read the overview and the Administration Guide and you should be fine.