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By 3rdw0rld3r on
Hi, I'm a total newbie with drupal and have been playing with it for the past 3 days.
I'm building a site for an artist cooperative group, with a very tight schedule (and budget, of course). Trying to keep things as simple as possible, with straightforward navigation and content relationships.
I'm having trouble getting past the initial learning curve, and a little confused with all the information I've been digging from the documentation and forums...
More specifically, I'm having a hard time creating the navigation as I need it to be (getting taxonomy to translate into navigation, menus, submenus, etc), and in the dark as to what theme to use as a basis to customize the site's look, since each theme implementation seems to work with different subsets of modules. I just know I would rather have one that uses templates and/or with strong use of css (xtemplate and interlaced are the ones I've been playing with).
The navigation structure is as follows:
About the Atelier (made up of simple pages with images, no need for user comments)
-- gen. info
-- history
-- members (mapped to drupal users, and I'm using the profile module for extended info)
-- services
-- how to participate
-- contact
Calendar
-- list of events by date, with short descriptions (leading to detailed ones), with option to filter by event type (seminars, expos, workshops)
Courses
-- list of courses, also with short descriptions leading to detailed ones, with option to filter by technique (photography, engraving, etc)
-- teacher profiles (also mapping teachers as drupal users)
Gallery
-- online gallery of their work (linked to respective artist profiles)
-- artist profiles (also drupal users)
Blog
-- artists' blogs (multiple publishers)
The modules I've installed so far, some of which I'm having a hard time understanding how to appropriately apply:
- menus
- profile
- style
- taxonomy_context
- taxonomy_dhtml
- taxonomy_html
I'm looking into installing image.module or gallery.module, which would be more appropriate (meaning faster to implement)?
I'm using drupal 4.3, and I'm an intermediate php coder.
Hope I'm making sense and giving enough information... any help would be greatly appreciated! drupal seems to be a very powerful tool, and I plan on using it for another project that's coming up, if I can only get up to speed quickly enough.
best
Oliver
Comments
Keep At It!
There are several menu/navigation modules available for Drupal, which means there is a good chance that one of them does what you want it to - on the other hand it can seem confusing to have too much choice
Options you didn't mention: Navigation Table, and Popup Menu - which will give you even more menu choices. (see Projects)
Drupal 4.4 is out soon, and with it comes an updated xTemplate system, which will make it much easier to modify and create templates - without any PHP coding
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Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
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will check them out
thanks for your reply MegaGrunt. I will check these modules out...
The help link in the menu admin mentions that it's not made for displaying content, but rather for structuring it... does this mean it's not supposed to be used for publishing menus?
I will definetly keep at it, but I'm real short on time...
It's not so much the number of options (which is quite nice, as is the modularity) but the lack of documentation that I find confusing... for instance, I've created a menu (with the menu module) using a simple vocabulary, but have no idea of how to make it appear. should it appear automatically? if so, am I using the wrong theme (but I'm testing it with several different ones)? the admin interface isn't self-explanatory, there's no "publish menu" option for instance... do I need to add something to the theme code? in other threads somebody mentioned the need for at least small howtos... I fully agree, and can offer to help out in creating more of them.
but first I need to shake my newbieness off ;) and get this project out the door.
aha
just noticed Navigation Table is your baby ;)
thanks for writing this, I'm checking it out.
does it work only with books?