[support] Is there any sort of map/overview/tree in Drupal?

[Earl Miles]

cl at 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.