Hello all,
I am new to Drupal, and am quite enjoying discovering the ways in which it does things, often differently to other CMSs I've come across. One thing which I am missing is the ability to layout the site in a hierarchical manner, creating pages (or nodes) as children of other nodes. I have been using EZPublish for a little while, which is a fantastic, if overcomplicated CMS (actually it's more of an application development environment, but that's getting a little off-topic) and it does the herarchical thing really well.
I am inpressed by the taxonomy and the ways in which it can create complex relationships between nodes in a drupal site. I was mulling over the idea of creating a module which, given a hierarchical taxonomy, could 'attach' nodes to the terms of the taxonomy, thus creating the site structure. I realise that this suggestion has it's complexities, but I have a feeling that this could be a really useful feature.
This only really makes sense when using the new 'clean URLs' feature as the URL will represent the site structure. With clean URLs there is almost the facility to hierarchise pages, but this is only through the url, and there is no way of automatically creating a menu to represent these relationships. But if we were to define the path by the attachment to the hierarchy, then we can make a more sensible relationship between the documents.
For example, if I have a taxonomy as follows:
Site
--- Contact
--- Projects
--- --- Project 1
--- --- Project 2
--- And so on
Then by attaching a node to, say, Site >> Projects >> Project 1 would give that node the URL of site/projects/project_1
As I said, I am very new to Drupal, so I'm sure that what I just said either has already been done in another way or just doesn't make sense, but I would be very interested to hear from some of you more experienced dru-developers about where this whole idea might fall down. I'm already beginning to think of other types of assignments to taxonomy terms, such as making a taxonomy term a way of filtering all nodes which have been assigned to another taxonomy, so that you could have aggregator taxonomy terms as well as terms which have a 1:1 relationship with a node. If any of that makes sense ;-)
Anyway, It's late and I'm going to bed now :-)
All the best,
Ben Pirt
Comments
or
is this just like the book module?
I think it might be similar, anyone care to enlighten me?
The book does seem to be a hierarchical collection of nodes, but is it the same thing I'm talking about?
Did you check taxonomy_dhtml?
Did you check taxonomy_dhtml module?
It gives you a hierarchy with the number of articles under each one.
If not, then I did misunderstand what you said. Please clarify.
--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba
almost
I'd come across this module, but it doesn't do exactly what I'm thinking of.
The taxonomy_dhtml module lets the taxonomy terms act like containers, so that a number of nodes being assigned to one term will show up like items in a folder, whereas what I am thinking is that the term itself will be a reference to a node (as well as perhaps being a container for nodes assigned to that category. So in the previous example, clicking on 'projects' would just expand that category to reveal 'project 1' and 'project 2', but what I am proposing is that you would be able to define that, when clicking on 'projects' it should take you to a page you could have set up to explain projects.
Also, the URL would reflect the structure as set up in the taxonomy, whereas in the taxonomy_dhtml module it appears to ignore the clean URL and just use node/view/xx instead.
I guess the difference is quite small, and it might be that this could just be a modification of the taxonomy_dhtml module.
Ben
this is similar to /project on the drupal.org site
I'd like to know how this is done also.