I am currently looking at using either the Taxonomy or CCK module on my Drupal site as a means to create a hierarchical system. However, I'm a little confused on which one would best suit my needs, or if there is something else that would work better.
Basically, there will be probably 70 or so "mini-sites" on the website I'm working on, each with a landing page and about 5 sub-pages of detailed information. I need a way to mark those sub-pages as being sub-pages of their parent page, as well as create a menu system to navigate between them.
What is the best way this could be done? Thanks for your input!
Have you tried using the Book module? It might take a bit of theme-adjusting to get it to look right it seems to be how most people settle on displaying this type of page structure.
Depending on your needs, Organic Groups and/or Spaces can be a good alternatives, since it'd allow you to easily control themes, permissions and other settings in a mini-site basis.
Each Mini-site would be an OG node and/or a space, and subpages could be organized in tree structure as well, using Book module from Drupal Core.
The best option is the book module. It gives a way to organise hierarchical content in a book manner. There are 2 blocks generated automatically: the book navigation and the book outline which gives, for each page, a link to the previous and the next content.
For more information drupal handbook: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/book
Related
I'm having a hard time getting to grips with menus when using the Internationalisation (i18n) suite for Drupal 7.
I have two languages set up for the site I'm working on - English and Welsh.
In the Multilingual Options for Main Menu, I've set it to Translate and Localise.
This appears to be fine, but creating the Welsh versions of pages creates nodes that themselves are not linked to the menu, so when they're displayed on the front-end, the menu structure is lost.
However if you do create a menu link for the translated page, you create a new menu item that essentially doubles up the menu size.
Which method is one meant to use? Do you have one menu structure per language and therefore try and work the code displaying the menus to only show the current language or can you somehow let Drupal know that English page N and Welsh page Y both attach to the same menu item?
As ever, any and all assistance given is greatly appreciated.
~Matt
Your best help will come from the drupal docs.
There are a few ways to setup multilingual websites and it wouldn't be possible to cover it all here.
https://drupal.org/node/275705
Follow the above tutorial as you will need to install quite a few modules. My guess is you may have to revisit your Drupal structure before being able to solve your issue.
I've had to work on a lot of French/English websites and the best thing I find is having separate menus for each language. Then use blocks to show your menus using the Language visibility settings. One better is to use the Menu Block module.
With this method you can end up having a lot of menus (as each menu needs to be duplicated per language). However I find content editors can much better grasp this separation, over the confusion of mixing menu items from different languages in the same menu.
I'm developing an online magazine, and am using Views to generate blocks for the homepage.
I am using a slightly customized Article as the content type for most of my data, with Views providing blocks with the necessary fields from those Articles. For example: the Latest Blogs View shows the Short Headline and Teaser fields, but the Top Headline View provides a block with the Image and Full Headline fields.
Right now I'm using Views to filter Article by tag, so Articles need to be tagged to show up on the homepage. Most of my blocks are lists and don't need the tightest sorting flexibility. However, some blocks are not lists, or it's important for the end user to have control over the display order of Articles in certain blocks. Is there a way to enforce site-wide 1:1 tagging for term:article relationships. For example, I want to ensure that only one Article is tagged top.news.1 (the first Top News slot), and likewise only one article is tagged top.news.2. When someone wants to add top.news.2 to an Article, the one Article that already has that tag will lose it. Or something like that.
I have played around with Views enough to gather that it is really powerful, so this level of microcontrol might not be necessary with the right configuration, but I think restricting taxonomy versus configuring Views filtration would address the problem more directly.
I've looked around the web and haven't been able to find anything really relevant. Sorry if I missed something obvious.
Thank you!
Is it correct that you (or your site editor) want the ability to:
spotlight a certain nodes
arbitrarily change the order of the spotlighted nodes, or add/remove a node from the spotlight while keeping the position of the other nodes?
If so, your best bet is likely Nodequeue, which does exactly that, and allows you to restrict the number of nodes spotlighted. It's very easy to use and our non-technical clients have no problems with it.
If your use case is different from that or requires more flexibility, Nodequeue may not be the right fit, but it works great for the specific example you're describing.
I've recently taken on a project from a client of mine, after a lot of persuasion I've managed to finally get the website under some kind of CMS. I'm pretty new to Wordpress I've come from an ExpressionEngine background and fancied trying something new for a change, so excuse the lack of knowledge (I'm trying my best! :D).
Now The issue I'm currently facing is that they have very specific directions regarding how they want their content displayed on their website and more importantly how they would like to manage it. They are a travel agent I'm currently putting together the resort directory that will display all of the resorts they offer.
In regards to the current structure of the directory it will be made up of 4 different sections. To give you a better understanding of how I want things to work take a look at this hierarchy below, (I've used turkey as an example, these would need to be dynamic):
/destinations/ This will be our destinations page that will list
all of the countries they currently
offer. I imagine this to be a static
page with some content about the
countries on offer with a list of the
countries below (These will be our
parent taxonomies).
/destinations/turkey/ This will be our parent taxonomy. This
page will also have to have the
ability to add some static content to
insert information about the country
and its locations. Below this will be
a second list, these will be the
different areas of turkey (These will
be children of the parent
taxonomies).
/destinations/turkey/belek/ This will be our child taxonomy, This
page will again need to have the
ability to add some static content.
It will also include our list of
resorts that my client offers within
this location (These will be our
entries/posts).
/destinations/turkey/belek/resort-name
This will be our post/entry page,
here we will have all of the
information on the select resort, the
specifics of this aren't an issue and
I've already got this sorted.
Now, I've done a lot of reading up on custom post types, custom taxonomies and their abilities and uses but I'm hit with a situation at the moment where I can't decide on which route I should take. I've been experimenting over the last few hours with the setup of one custom post type (for resorts) and one hierarchical taxonomy (for locations). Which works some what ok BUT due to the limitations of the taxonomy UI within the admin panel it doesn't allow me to add my static content/images etc. (I'd much prefer to use a WYSIWYG especially from a clients point of view).
So this makes me wonder if it would be worth making two custom post types and scrapping taxonomies all together, making one of the post types resorts and the other locations. With the locations post type I could set it up like the pages module (which would give me hierarchical controls to allow me to organise my locations how I had originally planned) but is this a wise move? I mean from what I've read you shouldn't really organise content this way but I've got a feeling that maybe just a clash of contextual semantics (I could be wrong!). Would there be any limitations for me setting things up this way should I wish to add search functionality in the future? Or anything else for that matter?
I thought I'd mention this before I FINALLY click the submit button (apologies for the great wall of text) but pages... I've read here that they are powerful little gems within Wordpress, how should I be taking advantage of these if I'm using custom taxonomies? How well do they work with listing categories are they what I need?
Right, that about wraps up everything I've got to ask for now - maybe I should have split this into a few posts but hey! I hope this gives you guys enough information about what I'm trying to achieve and please if I am going wrong feel free to point me in the right direction I'm really eager to learn more about Wordpress and it's capabilities.
Regards
Danny
While this is one approach, it sounds like what you really want to be using (rather than custom post-taxonomies) is simply the Page functionality of WP. Everything you're describing is simply the hierarchical structure of the navigation of your pages. Yes, you can use the custom taxonomies to accomplish this same thing, but since you're describing things that tend to be "one" thing (ie: a single resort) you probably don't need the taxonomies.
You might want to look at another option: PODS CMS http://podscms.com
This will give you a simple structure to add custom features to your posts relatively easily... Things like pricing, amenities, and other "organizable" details can be stored using PODS and then referenced across your site for better usability. It might be worth a look!
The home page of this site will have basically a 3 column layout.
I can create these as either content or blocks. I like using content because its easy for the user to understand, they login to the site, they browse to the page they want to edit, they click edit, but with blocks they have to go into Administer > Blocks etc
Any suggestions on this?
I would be managing the actual content as nodes(content) and then looking at blocks(or something like it) to arrange them how you like in your template regions.
If you are looking at creating custom home and/or landing pages, you might also want to look at http://drupal.org/project/panels - it can be a little heavy, but quite powerful for arranging content into columns and whatnot.
Not really sure what you're asking...
Administer > Blocks is for moving the blocks around into regions / disabling them, not really for creating content.
You can use the Node as Block module to easily turn your nodes into blocks, and they would still edit it from the content administration section.
Or, you could create a blank block, and in its associated template file (block-whatever.tpl.php) embed the node (node_embed, pretty much what the Node as Block module does) or query for it with a view and embed that (views_embed_view)
Or, if you're using views, you could create a view that queries for the node(s) you want and create a block display for that.
When you're actually building the Drupal site, you should consider what paradigm you're most comfortable with since there are so many ways to get your content together.
i would say boxes will help you. http://drupal.org/project/boxes
Many themes have block edit links/images as a part of them. Fusion is one such example.
I would suggest looking into Panels for layout and block editing, and also to download a version of open atrium. The layout management is uses is much easier than the administer blocks pattern.
A client asked me to redesign her web site, built several years ago in WP by another developer. Although I've never worked with WP before, I'm pretty comfortable with html, css, and php, and I more or less understand how WP stores content and dynamically builds pages. But I'm wondering how to approach these challenges:
My client's site has about 75 pages. There are about 25 that are static (i.e. the content changes infrequently if at all; things like "about us" and "faqs") and there are about 50 pages that are more "blog-like", except that instead of posts, the content contains directory-type info (e.g. 12 DJs in the area) or event-related info (e.g. upcoming shows at local theaters). Both of these categories contain many sub (and sometimes sub-sub) categories (e.g. medical services > pediatric > kid allergy specialists) and the content updates fairly frequently.
I understand the difference in WP between "pages" and "posts". But I need to find out the best way to structure the static content. Should I just set up a parent/child hierarchy of pages, changing the permalinks to something that makes sense? Or is it better / easier to just build the static pages outside WP and somehow link to them from the common navigation?
As a web designer, I want to "wow" my client with a great design. While there are loads of wonderful WP themes available, I really need to create something unique. But I'm wary of breaking something, so what's the best way to take an existing theme and just tweak it enough to make it look a little different?
Finally, other than mounting a massive "copy and paste" effort when the new site is built, is there a way to transfer content from the original site to the new one?
By reading your question, it seems to me that choosing WP for this kind of website was a bad choice.
Redesigning it, though, won't be that hard if it's using page templates for pages.
And yes, there's a import/export tool in WP to tranfer content. (see administration panel)
I, really, advise you to read this great tutorial about creating WP themes.
I've a blog-like WP site myself (contains RPG development articles). Here's what I did. Nested static pages simply have parent-child hierarchy: /about/mingos - that's easy to understand and i value this kind of content organisation (personal opinion).
As for themes, there's a no-brainer tool that, while not exactly apt for real business, has the capability of letting you see how stuff will look in seconds, and can sometimes give you great ideas. It's called Artisteer and there's a demo on its site that you can have a look at. Try your design ideas with it, see how stuff will look like. I'm sure you can come up with some great ideas for a "wow" design :).
Exporting content, as Soufiane Hassou remarked, is possible from within the admin panel.
Don't rule out using categories to create your hierarchy. That way you'd get the benefit of cross categorization of DJs and venues by location to create a robust cross reference system. Pages don't get this benefit without extra work.
To make this in to a directory, though, is gonna either be heavy work on managing the pages or heavy work on creating a solution that will cross reference everything and bring the content together in a usable way on the front end.