cl@isbd.net wrote:
It just seems strange that something so essential/fundamental/useful (depends on your view I suppose) isn't in the default Drupal. It's not in Joomla either but it *is* in some other CMS and, at least for a newcomer it makes them a whole lot more usable.
This one really is a POV thing. Simply put, if your site is designed that way, it seems essential. But not all sites are designed that way.
I was actually just thinking to myself the other day that the old Site Map model has been slowly disappearing; the model is somewhat limiting, in that it really makes an assumption of static content that's placed in a library and then never or rarely changes. That's not really what CMS's are expecting to do. They're expecting to have living content that changes a lot.
In Drupal, people typically structure their content through taxonomy and/or the menu and/or the book module. You tag your content to fit it into the taxonomy structure and use taxonomy_menu to generate a tree.
Using the book module will automatically give you a default tree hierarchy, with navigation, and it's *very* typical on the net of having tiered content. I.e,
Foobar manual Introduction Chapter 1: Baz Baz for you? How to baz Why baz, anyway? Advanced baz Baz for breakfast Baz for lunch Baz for dinner
Each node in a book then includes forward/backward/up navigation, as well as a tree of all the nodes beneath it.
Book is fairly constrained, in the sense that it's harder to control the navigation output than I'd like, but it does the job if that's what you're looking for.
When using taxonomy to structure a site, you're 'grouping' nodes. You can use various taxonomy modules to create some kind of a structure to find node groups, and then browse through teasers. This, likely, isn't entirely what you want given what you've said, but you can also use things like taxonomy redirect and views to completely change exactly what it is you get when you go to a given taxonomy term. And you can use pathauto to get the tids out of the URLs so that it looks nicer.
And as Larry suggested, with the built in menu.module, you can give nodes menu entries as you create them, and put them in the menu structure.
The one thing I'll say: What you suggest basically, where you have a map of nodes and how the nodes link to each other...that's generally done done, in part because it makes the nodes too important. The content is expected to be fluid and come and go, and I think you're creating more in the way of static content. That's fine, and I understand what you want, but it does mean you're using a tool that's not quite meant for it, and as such sometimes things that seem fundamental to what you're doing simply won't be available because not that many people think about their site like that.