By kabkab on

Hi,
I'm new with Drupal, with our website we use vivvo which is really appropriate to our requirements.
I have to change this website and I'm testing differents CMS.
I'm very impressed with Drupal but I'm blocked with some exigencies.

1. There will be users : journalists, editors, administrators. Each of them must not use the standard interface of Drupal. I have to create special pages with different roles.
2. An article will contain different fields than the standard offered with Drupal. I understood the use of CCK.

  • Strapline
  • Title
  • Abstract
  • Body (I have to not use the standard one because the abstract and the body must be separated)
  • Author
  • Created date
  • Image
  • Caption
  • Category
  • Attachement (with some special articles which will have PDF attachement)

3. Menu links (I know that I'll use taxonomy)
4. Image field and attachement must contain a relative link to the files without using the upload option. Just select from directories and insert. They will be uploaded using FTP before selecting.

I seen lot of modules and tutos but can't choose which will be apropriate to me.

Thanks to every one especially those who have the kindness to guide me.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

rhuffstedtler’s picture

rhuffstedtler commented

Hi kabkab,

Your question is really almost too big to answer, but I'll give you some thoughts that will hopefully get you going, and maybe from there you can come back with some more direct questions.

I'm curious about the rationale behind your first requirement. If you get into extensive UI customization for contributors, you are going to be taking on a big burden of maintenance and training. If your requirement is driven by usability concerns, look at the Spark (https://www.drupal.org/project/spark) project or at a distribution like Panopoly (https://www.drupal.org/project/panopoly) that includes a lot of UI improvement work.

For your title, just use the built-in title.

The Field and Field UI modules in core are going to give you most of the other things you want.

Your category is probably going to be a term reference field

Here's a good overview of working with images: https://www.drupal.org/documentation/modules/image. Consider adding the Picture module if you need to handle responsive design.

Look at the Media module for handling your file attachments. You might want to consider adding the PDF module to provide a viewer as well.

For the author, that information is natively available on the node if the author is the one actually posting it. If instead you have the situation where content entry people are copying and pasting from a word doc or similar, you might want to do something like have a content type for your authors that would have their bios, pictures, etc. In that case, your author field would probably be a node reference field.

Hope that helps you get started.

Cheers,
Rob

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

agree with everything rhuffstedtler has already said. Just a couple of other stray thoughts:

re #1: although I agree with rhuffstedtler, you can set up customized landing pages for the different roles quite easily. I use the panels module for that, but there are several other methods. Also, as rhuffstedtler said, spark and panopoly are excellent and definitely worth a test drive. I usually don't use distros, but they're worth checking out to see what can be added to your own site.

re #2: cck is d6 only-- drupal 7+ has fields in core. Most of those seem like standard core field types. In addition to author, create date (as well as updated date and a complete revision history is handled by default by core drupal).

re #3: menu links may or may not be taxonomy based. Taxonomy is about categorizing content. You can then add links for categories of content to menus if you wish, but menus != taxonomy necessarily.

re #4: seems to me the most puzzling requirement of all. It sounds like an artificially imposed requirement, likely for an unnecessary reason, and a usability nightmare, but without more detail it's impossible to say for sure. That said, there's also the imce and filefield_sources modules for browsing/inserting files from the file system.