By Andrewkhan1 on

Hi all,

I was hoping you could give me some advice on Drupal... I have a project to do a publishing site that has a database of company profiles, with brands, products and advertisements linked to them.

I was hoping to do this by linking content types together using the Node Reference module and displaying them via views. That should get me the basic relationships down.. However this is my first time using Drupal so I am not sure on a few things...

Any help is greatly appreciated..

1. Is there a way I can track click throughs on my advertisements? What would be the best module to handle banner advertisements? Granted the click throughs would then need to be linked to the company, So that I can generate reports per company. I also need to track when they were clicked so I can filter by time I.e. clicks over the last week.

2. What is the best version of Drupal to be running at this point? Drupal doesn't seem to have a lot of 6's modules supported. I.e. the advertisement module. And a lot of these unsupported modules I need for my functionality.. Is it worth using 6 still?

3. Is there an email newsletter module that can display views as the content?

4. Is there anyway to create an interface where an admin can login and 'approve' web form submissions (which would then mark them as accepted and then perhaps send an email to the applicant?)?

5. Is there anyway to import for example an CSV to a Drupal installation which could create nodes in a certain content type?

6. Is there a way to make a form create a node when submitted?

7. Is it possible to have multiple site themes in one site? Sharing the same nodes? (different sites, linked database)

I realise this is a lot of questions so I understand if not all are answered, but any help at all will help me greatly as I can finally say that we can 100% do all of this. I don't necessarily need to know how to do it at this point.

Writing sections entirely in PHP should be a last resort, should stick to modules for that!

Any help is really appreciated. Thank you!

(To be fair there is probably more questions to come, uh oh!!)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x

Comments

john_b’s picture

john_b commented

1. I don't really know whether existing modules do this adequately. See http://drupal.org/project/referral
2. D6 is stable. Will be end of life when D8 is released (at least a year). D6>D7 updgrade often is very difficult. So only use D6 for a short-term project, not for a site which should still be around in years to come.
3. There is really only one email newsletter module, simplenews. You can google Simplenews Views integration. Many of the results will relate to displaying newsletters on the site rather than Views content in the newsletter. But see http://mrsimonelliott.com/blog/simplenews-creating-news-letters-using-vi.... Personally I would always steer clients towards outsourced newsletters such as Aweber, Adestra, Mailchimp, for a whole range of reasons.
4. You can approve any content a user submits. If you want users to be able to create a node, you would not use a Webform normally, just a node/add form.
5. Feeds module.
6. Yes, a node create form creates a node when submitted. There is no reason not to allow anonymous users to submit a node edit form, provided you have spam protection and suitable permissions set.
7. The best answer depends on what you are trying to achieve. For multiple themes and no more see http://drupal.org/project/role_theme_switcher/. For multiple sites sharing content see Domain Access module, which has a theme-switching sub-module. For mobile-specific sites, mobile tools. There are other approaches depending on the conditions under which the theme will change.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors