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By Robardi56 on
Hi,
i'm considering converting my site to drupal, but before the move, I need precise answers to my questions please.
1) My site is a business directory. A kinda yellow page directory. Here are the features that I use, please tell if I can replicate this in drupal
- A link belongs to several categories
- A link has custom date entry input fields (address, zip, country, long description....)
- I can perform a search on several fields, like search by zip+ country.....
- Link has a "detailed page" so when in category, user can click on "more info" link
- I can choose which field to display or not on category page AND detailed page
- If a field contains no data, it will not display its label
- RSS Syndicate new links feed
From my understanding, this kind of directory can be achieved with the "taxonomy" system of drupal. So with taxonomy, I could even create several directories, each with its own custom fields: a company directory, a people directory, a product directory..... correct ?
Examples sites welcome.
2) Can Drupal be used for a big files (50mb) download directory ?
3) Is drupal login universal ? I mean, if a user register, will he have access to ALL authorized site modules and features ? I ask this because at looking at another CMS, I noticed that some modules, like calendar, had another user base forcing user to register again.
4) I was very happy to discover the drupal rss aggregator module, which would take several souces, and, if my understanding is correct, merge them into a single, chronological feed. I looked at the out backend syndication of this feed, and noticed it linked directly to the articles aggregated, for example, a google news. Wouldn't it be possible, to have links in the backend link to MY drupal site indivudual page of that news, containing the title and resume it has aggregated with a link to the actual news ? So when a site would syndicate the content I have aggregated trough drupal, all links would lead to my site for that news. This would create much more traffic. I don't know if I made myself clear. Any example of aggregation are welcome.
Sorry if questions seems heavy, but I must be sure that drupal is the right product before I make the move. I have currently retained only two products, after elimiminating all the others CMS: drupal and a commercial CMS.
Cordially,
Brakkar
Comments
A few answers
1a. yes.
1b. Not sure what you mean by "custom date". For the custom fields you need to use flexinode or cck (coming soon) or create a custom module.
1c. Not by default. You can with a custom module. See the project.module for an example. (This is used on drupal.org)
1d. yes
1e. with custom theme
1f. You have to create a custom theme to not display an empty label. (See themeing flexinode).
1g. never tried the RSS stuff
2. The is a hosting and php configuration issue not drupal.
3. Yes.
4. Not sure.
This is drupal directory site: http://www.buyblue.org
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Thanks for your
Thanks for your answers.
First congratulation for your site.
I meant "custom data", not "date", my mistake.
You couldn't have shown a better example of what I want to achieve.
It seemes that you have lots of custom fields. I also particularly like how each company is associated with several type of data (summary, information, financials, ratings.....) .
Can you elaborate please on how you associate these kind of information categories (each with its own data fields) under a companys entry with drupal system ? The concept of taxonomy, nodes and data organisation is still vague to me at this point. In my case I would need to associate /company/products/staff.
Can you display the number of links in your categories ?
Can user submit a new company content ?
Thanks,
Brakkar
Not my site
Sorry Buyblue.org is not mine. It is just a good example of what is possible. The owner/creator is sometimes on the forums.
The concepts of nodes and taxonomy take a while to comprehend, but they are very powerful. Nodes are basically and type of content. You can create your own (efectively subclass) node by creating a new module (or using flexinode). Taxonomy is way to categorize the nodes.
Read more here: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy
You will probably also want the views module: http://drupal.org/project/views
I would suggest downloading it and trying it. It took me sometime to really start to grasp how taxonomy works and how powerful it could be.
Can you display the number of links in your categories ?
Yes.
Can user submit a new company content ?
Yes. By default you can create different roles and give them different permissions (create content x,y but not z).
P.S. I would start with 4.7. It is stable enough to begin development and it has a lot of new features (esp if you want to create custom modules).
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I will definitely going to
I will definitely give it a try.
Taxonomy / nodes system is still very vague to me, and I will have to learn the concept.
It seems it is going to be a bit tricky also to learn the phptemplate system. From what I undestand, I can put any html code in template, and have the variables and database content pulled from php code.
I guess it will take me quite some time to figure this all, but it seems worth the try as drupal is quite a unique CMS.
Brakkar
Using the template engine is
Using the template engine is realtively straight forward. I would just start with a template to modify. It will already have all the variables output.
Personally, I prefer the Smarty theme engine: http://drupal.org/project/smarty
You have to install it separately, but it allows your designers to write in html/smarty syntax instead of php. To me, the phptemplates are scary because you can easily defeat all the access controls with the wrong php in your template.
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Answers
For the most part, yes. You could probably get away with using the flexinode module to create different node (what you call "links") types -- company nodes, people nodes, product nodes, etc. You can then use taxonomies to tag nodes with whatever characteristics you want ("Contract", "Full-time", "24 hours", etc.), and then pull entries based on those taxonomies. However, I'm not sure if you can do the "search on specific fields" and "choose what fields to display" with the flexinode module as-is.
Depending on how urgent those features are for you, it might be easier to write custom node types instead of using flexinode -- you can then create controls to specify which fields to display ("Show the fax number for this company, but not that one"), as well as hooks to the search engine. I may be biased, though, since I generally prefer to write custom node types for the greater flexibility they provide instead of relying too much on flexinode.
Can't imagine why not. Just make sure your hosting service and/or PHP and/or Apache configuration is okay with that -- I had to recently tweak the PHP settings on a site because I wanted to upload 10MB files, and the default had a maximum limit of 2MB.
It depends on what access privileges you give the user. Drupal allows you to create an arbitray number of user roles, and to limit what features each role can access. An administrator can change the roles for each individual user, so (for example) Joe could have access only to the forums and image galleries, while Steve has access only to the blog and the forums.
I believe the aggregator module is needed only if you want to aggregate RSS feeds from other sources -- out-of-the-box, Drupal already automatically creates RSS feeds for your site's content, no twiddling required.
--R.J.
http://www.electric-escape.net/
--R.J.
Thanks for your answer. Can
Thanks for your answer. Can you please briefly elaborate on the difference of "nodes" and "flexinodes" ?
Thanks,
Brakkar
Nodes vs. Flexinode
A "node" is a standard Drupal unit of content -- i.e., a node can be an article, or the information for a business, or an image. Drupal comes initially with a "page" node and a "story" node, but you can install other modules to get other node types, or -- if you're comfortable programming with PHP -- create your own.
"Flexinode" is a Drupal module that lets non-programmers create their own node types. You specify what fields you want, what they're called, what order they're listed in, etc. It is a handy way of creating custom node types without programming.
--R.J.
http://www.electric-escape.net/
--R.J.
Thanks for your answer.
Thanks for your answer.
So in my case, I would create the folowwing nodes: "Companies" "Products" and "People" Nodes. Each tagged with taxonomies.
What are the limitations of flexinodes compared to custom programming them ?
Cordially,
Brakkar
With a custom module you can
With a custom module you can do much more than flexinode and with better performance.
However, you can add a flexinode in minutes and it often is exactly what you need and the performance difference is likely only a factor for large sites.
I like to use flexinodes for prototpying, then if there is a need I can always convert to a custom module.
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