Pre-installation, Drupal mental model, Nodes, and losing /node/ from the url

By auntialias on 22 Feb 2005 at 21:07 UTC

I'm weighing whether to try Drupal for a site I want to create.
(Glad to see that there's a how-to-install addendum for 3rd party hosting and PhpMyAdmin, because I have no shell access, nor mysql command expertise).

The site I have in mind has the following:

Blog-like news stories (I am central content creator of blog)
Feature articles/Stories/interviews.
Reader Comments on blog posts and features
Reviews of hardware/software (generated by me, or suggested by others), commented on by any and all.
Audio/video file repository as part of feature content
Discussion forum
Stories from site membership/readership that can emerge from comments, forum, and be elevated to Feature Story
Amazon and/or other affiliate sales stores
The rest of the Usual Suspects: FAQ, Privacy, About, Contact
Events Calendar (upcoming events)

Looking at the About/Case Studies/Modules listings here on the site, I see that Drupal is up to the task.

I spent a little bit of time in the Drupal site at opensourcecms. It's between Expression Engine and Drupal. Having used WordPress for my weblog for the last 9-10 months, I like the energy behind an open source software. (I saw the Jeff Veen thread on CMS usability and I, too, would like task-based documentation. I can write that stuff, so it's possible I might contribute some of that, too)

I'm trying to get my head around the mental model of Drupal. Seems that most everything takes place in a node. Is node the single building block of content created in Drupal... that can find its final form in a blog/story/book/forum post/comment?

Is it possible to use htaccess/mod rewrite to lose "node" from the URL? (I really want to have final say over the URL structure, and not have to accept what's given to me from Drupal or any CMS.)

On Taxonomy:
Is this the same thing as what are referred to as categories elsewhere, such as WordPress, pMachine, MovableType, Expression Engine? Is it possible for a single item (blog post, story) to belong to multiple taxonomies?

~~Anyone have examples of Drupal sites that do this?~~ Never mind, I saw lots of sites mentioned in this thread.

Thanks in advance for any comments you might offer.

Susan

Comments

pretty close

tag-1 commented 22 February 2005 at 21:20

You're pretty close overall on your understanding. All content is generally built around a 'node', which is sort of the fundamental building block of all content types. All the different content type modules (blog,book, story, etc.) use this building block and add their own features and attributes "around" it. This is 99% good and helpful, 1% a nuisance. But you're not likely to hit that 1% unless you're doing your own development of complicated types or relationships.

As for removing 'node'... this has long been a gripe of mine, but it's deeply embedded in the core code. There is a function you can define to enable 'mass url rewriting', but I had so-so luck with it long ago. But yes, with mod_rewrite, with smart enough rules you can basically do anything - including removing or changing 'node'.

You can have multiple taxonomies, each of which is basically a tree of categories. It would be like having multiple 'Category Groups' assigned to one blog in EE - which to my knowledge you can't actually do in EE. It enables very extensive and flexible categorizing - at the cost of a bit of complexity. Alternately you can just make one, call it 'Categories', and treat it as a plain old category tree.

Basically I find Drupal more developer-focused than EE or MT. I don't know WP very well, but I think it's also more dev-focused. So you can defintely use both very well without being into the code, but they are (both) strongly driven from the development side of things, as compared to MT and EE which are more polished for the end-user. Another benefit of this is you can make informed decisions about future plans, since they're not TOP SECRET with Drupal and WP. With EE and MT you have no idea what or when they'll release or change something.

Hope that helps a bit...

Thanks for the reply

auntialias commented 25 February 2005 at 05:34

Thanks for the reply, tag.

I think, at this point, rather than choose between the two, I'll be going with EE for one solution, and I'll install Drupal elsewhere. Twice the headache! Twice the fun!