General discussion

Different people have different needs for creating and presenting structured data. One person may want an elaborate user-profile module where users can enter their favorite ice-cream flavor and pet's name; another may want a movie-review module with special fields for IDMB references, movie ratings, etc. A third may want to post a schedule of conference events, with special fields for the event name, panel member names, times, etc.

Accommodating those needs through different modules may be inefficient in many cases. If there were an all-purpose structured-data module that a site administrator could use to set up columns of data and spawn new SQL tables, that would be a very powerful addition to Drupal.

How would this work?

The administrator would set up the number of columns to be used, their names and their data types, along with options for whether the data in each field is free-form or constrained, and if constrained, have the admin enter the range of possible values, and how it is presented (drop-down menu, radio buttons, etc).

A new SQL table would be generated based on that.

The module would accommodate searches in specific fields, perhaps with iterative winnowing of results (eg, first find all users profiles where country=UK, then find the subset of these user profiles where favorite ice cream=pistachio)--a lot of variations on searching are possible (ORs as well as ANDs). Likewise data could be sorted by field. Overview results would be shown in a table view, with detail views (perhaps following a theme that can be edited through the admin's interface) also available. Other forms of output, such as tab-delimited text files, could also be useful here.

Hi, I have used Drupal for some time and have finally managed to customise the tableless theme and am away to start work on a new module.

I thought everyone would like to see what I think about Drupal so your welcome to check it out on my site, Tusk Web.

Thanks for looking, please comment either here or on my site on any ideas or improvements to my site or review.

Because drupal uses session id's Google can ban your site. Session ids creates a loop for the googlebot to keep crawling u, which triggers the ban action.

Just thought you should know.

I am having a bloddy time trying to keep with xhtml 1.1 standards. Drupal seems to like to format some output for me.

First, my apologies if this is in the wrong forum.

I'm evaluating drupal as a website for a bunch of friends. Mostly, we'll be putting photos on there.

Taxonomies look like a particularly good way to organise the photos. I can have one for 'Parties', one for 'Holidays' and one for each year. By nesting them in different ways, I can navigate the content easily (using taxonomy_menu.module).

Some problems:

A question: why is user 1 specifically treated as special, rather than having drupal preconfigured with an 'administrators' role, and automatically putting the first user in that role?