[support] Newbee: How should I plan this?
Larry Garfield
larry at garfieldtech.com
Thu May 17 03:56:17 UTC 2007
On Wednesday 16 May 2007, A-NO-NE Music wrote:
> I am still far from being comfortable with Drupal. Here is a problem
> case I need to solve.
>
> I have huge list of musicians who have played for my past gigs and
> recordings. Many of them has their own website. Some of them will be
> listed for future shows.
>
> I would like to create 3 sections, Discography, Musicians, and Schedule,
> where I want to call names from the list of musicians along with its
> hyperlink for their site.
>
> I've got CCK and View, but I am not certain how I should plan this. Any
> comment would be appreciated.
You're already on the right track, then. :-) I'm not entirely clear as to
your data model, though. Are Discography, Musicians, and Schedule all lists
of all musicians on file, just showing different data? Are they
searchable/sortable?
I'd defintely start with a Musician node type (or Artist, or whatever). That
contains all the data about a single musician. Try to figure out what data
on them will be category-like in nature and which is "part of" the musician.
For instance, web site and number of people in the band are "part of" the
musician entity. For those, use CCK fields. Whether their music type is
rock, jazz, or disco would be a category-style bit of data. For that, use a
taxonomy vocabulary called "Music style" with possible terms rock, jazz, and
disco.
From there, you can create lists of musicians using Views by whatever
attributes you want. Eg, all musicians who play jazz, name and web site.
All musicians with more than 3 people, grouped by their music type. Etc.
For Discography, there's lots of ways you can do that. You could have
an "albums" field on a musician node that just lists album titles.
Alternatively, you could have an Album node type that has a nodereference
field that points to the musician node responsible for it (as well as year,
label, who did backup vocals, etc.). That gives you the ability to create
lists (Views) of album nodes, too, with links to their musician, grouped by
musician, etc. I'm sure you can think of lots of other cool things to do
with that sort of data.
You may or may not want to go this route directly, depending on what it is
you're lookig to display, but hopefully the above gives you an idea of how to
go about designing your data model "the Drupal Way". I would definitely
advise erring on the side of a richer data model that you're not using
rathern than a simple one that you may outgrow. You can certainly make
headaches for yourself either way, but IME it's better to have too many
options than too few.
Cheers.
--
Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession
of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas
Jefferson
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