Posted by rebster4blue on June 18, 2007 at 2:15pm
Hello,
We're starting a new site using Drupal, and I'll have many questions for your expertise, but one question I initially had was if you had any information how to do an annoucments page. Here is our current church website: http://annarbor.hmcc.net/
We want to do something similar on the homepage and also have a seperate page to do the annoucments. Anyone doing anything similar to that, that has a way of doing they could lend us? Thanks!
Looking forward to working w/ you all!
Comments
First you need to think of what an announcement means...
I took a look at your existing site, and it seems like most of your announcements are events. I can envision situations where they might not be, for example the hiring of a new staff person (which you can sort of turn into an event, if you want).
There are, of course, a zillion ways to handle this, but I'll tell you what we did, and what we found. First off, Drupal offers a native feature whereby content can get promoted to the front page. We didn't find this all that useful, because we needed control over the sort order, formatting, etc.
We wound up creating a block on the front page called "New and Notable". We use this for announcements that are NOT events. We have a separate block for upcoming events.
Have a look and see if it's at all like what you want to do, and if it is, I can give you the recipe.
Metropolitan United Church
2 Different Ways
My initial thought is there are 2 different ways to do this depending on what you are going to be doing.
The first way is the case that all announcements are the same content type. In that case create an announcement content type, with all of the fields you need, and list the content from that type with the views module.
The second way is for the case when you have more than one content type classified as an announcement. In that case the taxonomy system can help you out. Create a Vocabulary called, something like, type and add a term for announcement. Then, on every announcement classify it with that taxonomy term. To list the items you can you taxonomies built in system to list them or the views module.
I'm sure there are other ways but these are the two that come to mind.
News versus Events
When I initially built our site to do Drupal, I was never quite satisfied with how we did it. We had two types, "event" and "announcement". Both were treated as announcements, but it never worked very well.
On our latest reload, I altered this and I like it a lot better. I still have two content types, "event" and "announcement." However, only "announcement" shows up on the front page. The events show up in the calendar. The problem is that now we have to create two items for each event we want to announce, but that's not too bad a problem. I also added a CCK node reference field to allow the announcements to refer to the Events as "Event details" so that the visitor can get to the event calendar from there.
The main advantage to this is that there can now be multiple announcements for a single event or even a single announcement for several related events. Announcements that aren't events just aren't related to an event.
What about the front page?
But what about the front page? Is there a way in Drupal to have JUST the menu and a graphic, but not all the other content (i.e. menus, content, etc.)?
Front page module
There are several ways of doing it but by far the simplest is to use the frontpage module which allows unique content
Angus Pratt
Poet, Consultant, Web Designer
Check out my latest completed project - BCIT Faculty and Staff Association
Themes
We use two themes.
They are identical except that one has an extra navigation menu on it and a fixed header image.
The other (used by the 'brochure-like' pages) does not have this menu on it, and has a blank spot at the top where different header images are placed for specific pages.
I sense there is still room to optimize this a bit better - but for the most part it works well.