By ryangermann on

I'm looking for something that will help content creators: it isn't exactly a shopping cart I'm looking for: I have files that my customers will download (PDFs mostly) and I want content creators to be able to create "Profiles" for these documents. I want them to use a form specific to the need of describing these PDF files... including setting hierarchical categories from dropdown lists.

Once submitted, the "Profile" should just appear like any other article, searchable etc.,

So, I need to a) be able to create this form for data entry, b) add arbitrary metadata choices to controls, c) control layout of the rendered "Profile".

Are there modules or components to use for something like this (perhaps Ultracart or DrupalCommerce?)

If this is going to be a bunch of custom development, that's fine, I would just like to know rather than trying to find available modules that don't exist.

Thanks in advance

Comments

sprite’s picture

sprite commented

The best approach would be to create a custom content type and include a file field for the PDF files. The body field of the custom content type would contain the description of the PDF available for download. Create a taxonomy for the categorization of the PDFs and attach a taxonomy reference field to the custom content type to handle that.

You don't need to be creating a custom modules. Just use the countless features available from within Drupal to organize your content. However the heart of what you want to do is:

- custom content type
- file upload field in custom content type
- taxonomy of categories
- taxonomy reference field in custom content type

Create a Views with the Views module that exposes the taxonomy of categories, so that visitors can search and views those custom nodes based on category.

There is a mountain of documentation on these sorts of things on drupal.org, especially in the various documentation sections:

https://www.drupal.org/docs/8

... enjoy reading the documentation multiple times, and trying out features on a test site before actual development ...

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

sprite’s picture

sprite commented

You must move your post to the "post installation" forum.
Read the sticky topic at the top of this forum.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...