By mikesk on

Hi folks,
I am still trying to create a site using drupal, but find it really hard, seems to me that more documentation should be available.

I am building a providers yellow pages site, I have a table of all the countries(including the ISO names and codes) and a list of providers, each provider has various info such as address, contacts, offered services and so on. Each provider may be present in a number of countries.

As I understand I should use the taxonomy categories system. So I have countries vocabulary that has "countries" as a parent term, and each specific country is a child term ("USA", "Germany", "Argentina").
The second vocabulary is the providers vocabulary where "providers" is the parent, and specific providers are the children "ERT ", "Easynet","Shiny" and so on. Now I need specific pages(nodes) for every country that lists all the present providers under this country, and specific provider pages.

At first I need to create a node for every country, how do I do it? It should be a sort of a script that runs ones and creates a page for every country I have in the countries pages, tried to look at the node.module but this node_add, node_confirm, node_submit are kind of confusing. Later when I or any user add providers to the system a new node/page should be added to the system, with taxonomy tags to attach it to specific countries.

I am kind of lost with this implementation, anyone could help? I really need it done... I can pay some money if someone is willing to develop parts of this system.

Thanks a lot,
Michael

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

luyendao’s picture

luyendao commented

First of all, i feel your pain. Not being a hardcore programmer, you have undergone what all drupal users have felt - great confusion. I don't know if you're familiar with creating templates, like over-writing the display of story nodes, by creating a php file node-story.tpl.php for example and so forth.

There's two ways to do, the easiest way is to create a node and put categorize it - for example node named "Washington, DC" and slotted into the "USA" category. This is a bit time-consuming, but it's easy and you can template it using phptemplate like i described above, and each node can be unique.

What i'd also recommend you try, is install the "Views Module", when you enable it in drupal, there's actually 3 or 4 modules that you need to turn on. Here's a tutorial on views: http://drupal.org/node/63230

Views is a great smart query-builder, that lets you build lists of stuff based on a bunch of filters/criterias, it also lets you over-ride the drupal defaults, like how taxonomy aggregated lists of content appears when you pull up terms, or how the front-page is rendered.

Also check out nicklewis.org for lots of great tips.

mikesk’s picture

mikesk commented

I am a programmer with quite a few years of experience behind but I can't find the way to work with drupal as a programmer... It is quite easy to use the built in stuff but to work with it like a programmer is quite frustrating. I feel like playing a quest game, where I can never find the way to finish the stage.

But still, what is the way to programatically add nodes and assign them to taxonomy tags? Or any of this two separately?! I see the methods in node.module but can't find any documentation to use them :(

Anyone? Help?

nisguy’s picture

nisguy commented

But still, what is the way to programatically add nodes and assign them to taxonomy tags?

1. Create the Vocabulary (e.g. 'Countries' is the vocabulary and 'Spain' is one of the terms), but when creating the vocabulary select the 'content type' that you want to allow the category to be assigned to. For example, if you want to create 'Stories' and be able to assign them to a 'Country', checkmark the 'stories' content type while editing the 'countries' vocabulary.
2. Create the terms.
3. From the main menu on the left select 'create content'.
4. Choose 'story' and you will see an option for 'categories' which you can then select the country from the list.

I hope this helps. It's difficult sometimes to include all the details for someone new to the software. Once you see how it works together you can create custom content types with Flexinode or the CCK modules.

iandickson’s picture

iandickson commented

Nodes slot into structure.

So

Vocab 1 - called Country, and terms are for each country.
Vocab 2 - called Keywords - business type (or other descriptive terms that will allow them to be found).

Nodes are then created and assigned a Country and Keywords

As to finding them - VIEWS is easiest - two exposed filters - Country and Keywords and there you go.

Ian Dickson - community specialist.
www.emint.org - Association of Online Community Professionals