This is sort of a concept question. I wonder what sites are doing to get URLs for stories to reflect what might be called sections of a print publication, for example, ../news/big-fire-today or ../realestate/foreclosures-down-in-4th-quarter, etc. It appears to me that setting up Content Types for each category would be one approach. I might end up with:
News
Sports
Outdoors
Business & Real Estate
Arts
Food
...and so on
Alternatively, you could set the path in a standard content type, but this might be confusing to users and lead to inconsistencies. Also, it looks like Taxonomy Term Paths in ../admin/build/path/pathauto might be best. So many options!
I've been searching around the documentation and comments, but maybe I can't think of the right way to phrase this question.
What's the most sensible way to do this, in your opinion?
Comments
Taxonomy
Content types are for structurally different nodes. That's not what you're doing.
To organize nodes of similar structure (i.e., news stories) use taxonomy. To get nice urls, use pathauto. To override taxonomy listing pages with nice layouts, use panels.
Drupal Newspaper Showcase sites
To explain further... The URL mapping is independent of the Content type or taxonomy approach and can be defined in Path Auto.
Use the same content type if all of them have the same structure and Taxonomy to define the classification.
For Approaches to building a Newspaper Website, look for Showcase Write ups of other Newspaper website. One very early news papers to have their websites on Drupal is the New York Observer, checkout their writeup at: http://drupal.org/nyobserver.
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Thanks for pointers
Nicely and simply put! In case anyone else is searching around with the same questions and stumbles on this thread, ..admin/build/path/pathauto gets you to the settings but then what?
Aha! Here's where it is! For example, you can expand "Node path" and click on "Replacement patterns" and expand the Node drop-down for a list of choices.
For my articles nodes, I am using [termpath-raw]/[yyyy][m][d]/[title-raw]
Clarification for anyone else who stumbles on this
After changing any URL aliases, you must click on the Bulk Update tab, and update the URL's that you want to change. After doing that, if you click on your Articles that you create, they should have the proper URL heading. You do need PathAuto.
So, in summation, if you want your news, sports, blog, and such articles each under, something.com/news/somearticle, something.com/blog/mygreatday and so on, go to admin/structure/taxonomy and add vocabulary, mine is called "Website Sections", once you are done, click "Add Terms" for that vocabulary, and add your terms such as "Sports", "Blog", "News" and so on.
From there, go to admin/structure/content types and click on "Manage Fields" for the fields you want it to work for. I edited Articles. So, in "manage fields" in the "add new field" area, type in your vocabulary name, which is "Website Sections" in this example, select "term reference" and "Check Boxes/Radio". On the next page, select the "Website Sections" vocabulary. Do what you want in the next part, and save it.
Now, go to Admin-> Configuration -> Search and Metadata -> URL Aliases and click on the Patterns tab. In the "Patterns for all Article Paths" type in this, [node:field_website_sections]/[node:title] or select the two from the "Replacement Patterns" area.
Now, when you create new content, you can create a new article, put in the title (which will be part of your path), and there will be a "Website Sections" and your tag to select. If you have it selected to automatically create an alias, it should be correct now. If you already had webpages, you can update your aliases in the Patterns tab from the previous paragraph, but in the "Bulk Update" part. If you update it, it should update your aliases and you will be good to go.
Your article addresses should now be something.com/yourselectedtag/yourtitleforthearticle
I shared this, as it took me over a half work day just to do this. I am new to this as well, so figure it may help someone else as well.