Hi all,
I need a few clarifications to fully understand OpenPublish:
- Why is contexts used in displaying the full articles? It appears to be used to hook blocks to it, just wondering why Views is not used here. Asking for I might be overlooking something.
- Why are only a few fields used from 'Profiles' and all the rest added to the 'Author' content type? Why not group it all in 'Author' content type? Are there any advantages doing it the current way?
- I try to create a view where the bio is shown. The bio appears to be part of the profile (and not the content type 'author'). In the case of e.g. creating a view for articles and you would like to show the bio and author info for that particular article, how does one go about that? What should I call to get the bio being displayed? I now link it to 'Author(s)', yet that does not seem to work.
Cheers,
D
PS: I'm only loosely familiar with Drupal and learning as I go. Above question therefore might have more to do with general Drupal stuff than OpenPublish. Nevertheless, I'm deploying the OP for a literature journal holding about three different journal 'flavors'.
Comments
I'll give it a stab
--- Why is contexts used in displaying the full articles? It appears to be used to hook blocks to it, just wondering why Views is not used here.
Context controls what blocks display on a page (and many other contextual behaviors), depending on the content being viewed. For instance, if an author bio is displayed, context can make sure that author specific blocks (like a picture or the other author's articles) are displayed only on that page and not on article pages. Block display logic used to be controlled in the blocks admin page, but that required writing custom code into every single block to control when and where a block showed up. Context is a more specific and powerful way to control what gets displayed, all done in one central logic pane. Consider it block management on steroids. Views, on the other hand, doesn't control display logic at all. It generates the queries to create certain blocks and pages that will be controlled by the context module.
---Why are only a few fields used from 'Profiles' and all the rest added to the 'Author' content type?
The user & profiles interface is concerned with controlling user accounts specifically. (members of a Drupal site who can log into the site and have some management rights to the site based on their roles) This is completely different from authors or journalists who write articles for an Openpublish site. A journalist may not have any administrative rights to the website beyond his permissions to create/edit an article. Plus, there may be multiple authors/photographers/editors contributing to a single article. By making authors a content type, OP can give them more extensive coverage, such as bios, multiple portraits etc. that are not needed for Drupal administrative accounts. Plus, several authors can be associated with a single article.
User profiles and authors are two separate entities but they are also connected, since all authors must also be "users" in order to have administrative rights to create/edit articles. The Drupal 6 user system is limited, hence the need to create an "Author" content type. This problem will eventually be solved once OP moves to Drupal 7, because the new User system in 7 will allow more control over display and accounts due to Drupal 7's entity system. I suspect that Openpublish "7" will be a while coming however, since so much of OP has to be redesigned.