Best approach to menus on a weekly paper?
public
group: Newspapers on Drupal
rmills - Wed, 2008-02-06 19:08
I'm halfway threw setting up a newspaper site and I think I have everything figured out except the best way to approach the menu. Given its a weekly newspaper updating the menu by hand would be rough given the 50+ sections of the paper that would need to change. My first idea was to use views to limit the node with a single "checkbox" value then just show that View. But thats really going to screw with Google and I would rather use the Scheduler module anyway. Is there a way to setup my menus to auto update to the newest published article?
-RM
Sitewide tags: menu auto update
You could let them self
You could let them self populate with RSS feeds + Javascript pull downs
Here is an indea
RSS feed --> xml feed ( readable from javasctipt menu) --> javascript menu
Marcel
http://www.Motorology.com - Motorology network
http://www.MarcelPamphile.com - My personal Website
Well from a web standards
Well from a web standards stand point I would like to avoid javascript for the menu and use a more graceful unordered list approach when making them. I think I can theme the output to do it but I don't have a clue how to make it dynamic. Maybe a trick with menu hooks? I have looked but found nothing.
Export to UL/menu file ?
I would add a different export filter to the XML/RSS and instead have it output to a suckerfish-esque UL for dynamically creating your menus, but also stageable.
Basically trigger it to update the menu file that's read whenever an article which should appear in the menu is created.
Although I'm not sure why your menus would be changing weekly, even for a newspaper. The sections should be the links to the new content so that people can keep bookmarks properly and for search indexing...
**Michael
There are three possible roads to ruin-sex, gambling and technology. The most pleasant is with sex, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technology.
maybe I am looking at this wrong...
Maybe I am looking at this wrong. When I say the menu needs to be updated take for exaple the cover story (not the front page). If I use views I can just make a view show the page (example: mysite.com/coverstory) via a simple checkbox thats hidden (very hackish). That way the the URL for the menu never changes. IMO the better way is obviously having the menu link to the newest node (example: mysite.com/daily-drug-store-on-fire) and some how have the menu know to link to that page, then when next weeks issue comes up the newest cover story line could be (example: mysite.com/drupal-takes-over-microsoft). Now the first link "mysite.com/daily-drug-store-on-fire" should still work and be available in a list but not shown as a cover story. Am I making since?
Am I just going about this the wrong way?
Please explain ....
Please explain what you're actually trying to do. Maybe a screenshot or a URL would help.
Generally you do NOT want to mess with the menu system in the context you're suggesting. Menus are for navigation to functionality and/or topical collections.
If you want precise manual control of lists of content, install the Nodequeue module (which lets you manually assign items to specific lists) and the Views module (which generates various sorts of collections, potentially based on nodequeue). The final result might be blocks containing headline collections, which you then might assign to specific pages.
See reply...
Just added as you replied http://groups.drupal.org/node/8705#comment-26992
Let me know if I am not being clear enough, I think I have confused myself at this point...
I'm not exactly sure I
I'm not exactly sure I understand what you are doing, but it is sounding as if you are looking for a way to add content to your site so that much of the process of organizing/sectioning it (not just menus) is relatively automatic?
Have you seen the information.dk (http://drupal.org/information.dk) and New York Observer (http://drupal.org/node/141187) write ups? They discuss two different ways of doing what I think you might want to do. But if I misunderstood, then ignore at will.
Custom module?
I don't know if this is relevant to the original question or not, but I had a similar issue where I needed menu drop downs to automatically populate when new terms were added to a specific vocabulary. I went with a custom module to handle the deed.
I use Collapsiblock, Taxonomy Menu and Category
I use Collapsiblock, Taxonomy Menu and Category to categorize submissions/stories and the structure of all submissions falls in place. Because I am a community journalist publisher, I require users to select one of the content categories (actually multiple in my case). This allows for editorial/backend control of menu population and content. It also is possible to easily add menu items and categories to update to new menus/content if you need to.
I am not certain this is what you are trying to achieve; however, if you look at www.vineyardvoice.org you can see how the accordion menus are structured.
If it turns out that this is what you are interested in I can provide further feedback.