By mozna on

hi,

i'm new to drupal and i just don't find a way to do very simple things i could do easily with the CMS i usually use (SPIP). bur for this project i have to use drupal so here is what i try to do: i want a website with 4 big sections:

1. frontpage
a static page with some dynamic parts like latest articles published, a range of selected articles, latest blog entries,..

2. articles
divided into sections with the sections listed in the submenu under articles, when clicking on one of these sections i would like to get an overview of all the articles in the section with a summary
(in spip you have different field for title, subtitle, description, introduction, body and postscriptum while in drupal i only see title and body - can i add fields? how do i define an introduction that i want to display for instance in bold and another font-size except for hard coding in every story? )

3. links
i tried the module 'weblinks' but i find that when i publish a weblink this doesn't get published or if it does only the title without a link
the site will contain about 600 links so i want to work with sections in the menu and an overview when clicked on that menu item

4. blogs
i didn't start exploring that so no questions yet except for if someone has any hints for creating about 6 blogs with different users who should be only able to create entries in their own blog...

i know this is much but i spend days already trying to find good documentation and i find the drupal site very disappointing. or i search the wrong way. i don't understand that these things seem so difficult to do while i am experienced in design and some php...

thanks for helping me out!
(btw: the site i'm redesigning is www.xyonline.net and the redesign is on xyonline.net/cms

Comments

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Have you worked with any other CMS except SPIP? I think the problem is that each CMS has its own conceptual framework and it takes some work to become familiar with a new one and to know how to do those "simple things". It's like learning a different musical instrument.

1. Frontpage: By default Drupal's front page is a list of teasers (summaries) with the recent nodes (articles). You can change that in General Settings and make the front page any path you want (for example, a page you have written yourself). Another way is to use the Front Page module (http://drupal.org/project/front).

For the dynamic parts, you can use blocks in the sidebars. There are several ready blocks in core Drupal and in modules, and you can also make your own blocks containing php code. You can also set up in which paths each block will appear or disappear.

2. Articles: When a node is created it can have two properties: (a) It has always a Content Type ('story', 'page', 'blog entry' etc or one you have created yourself using the CCK module, let's say 'article'). (b) It can be tagged to belong to some Categories which you have created for this node type. So, you can always pull all the nodes which have a specific property and give them an URL which you can use in a menu. A precious tool for pulling nodes with various criteria is the Views module (http://drupal.org/project/views).

About the fields, with the CCK module (http://drupal.org/project/cck) you can create Content Types for which you can define any fields you want. You can also theme their appearance with the help of the Contemplate module (http://drupal.org/project/contemplate).

3. Links: I can't help much there. You could ask its developers (http://drupal.org/project/issues/weblinks).
There is also a more thorough but less tested module called 'links' (http://drupal.org/project/links).

4. Blogs: It's there. Any user who has the relevant permission automatically has a personal blog page. The blog of user #5 is at /blog/5, while /blog contains all the blog posts.

All paths which I mentioned can be aliased to anything you want. As you should have guessed by now, in Drupal much is done by using modules.

By the way, take a look at the Handbook pages on this site if you haven't already. As I said, it's like learning a new musical instrument.

mozna’s picture

mozna commented

thank you for the quick reply. i'll check these things out and get back if necessary. i understand that this is about getting to understand the internal logic and i do have to admit that took me quite q while to understand spip's logic too.