On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 09:56:59AM -0800, Earl Miles wrote:
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.
Yes, I realise that, obviously a lot of people are using Drupal successfully so it must be possible! :-)
However one can only really voice one's own opinions, the world would be a very boring place if we didn't.
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.
Yes, I suppose that's true and maybe that's why I'm having a problem finding a CMS that suits me because I *am* trying to create a fairly static site (and I think a fairly static site is right for my application).
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.
But (at least for some sites) there is surely a requirement to have one page which is the front page and also, possibly/probably a few other 'fixed' places like a contacts page, or a forums page, or whatever. Surely *some* things need to be fixed or bookmarks will become useless.
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.
Ah, thanks, that looks interesting and could well suit what we're after.
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.
I can see that taxonomy makes sense for certain types of website but I don't think it's what we want.
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.
Yes, you're exactly right, I'm after creating something that isn't Drupal's main raison d'être, however there don't seem to be many (any) tools around which are aimed squarely at what I want. ... and I don't think what I'm after is all *that* unusual.