Hi everybody,
I started using Drupal a few months ago and am now redesigning the newspapers website that I work for. Before, we had a local web development company creating it for us, but they've become pretty unresponsive to your requests over the past year, so we've decided to create it in-house using Drupal.
Maybe this is a newbie question, but I'm sure everybody has ran into. It regards sections for our news site.
I have set up a Taxonomy vocabulary called "Sections" and inside of it there is a hierarchy for our consistent articles that run each week. Example:
News
... VuePoint
... Dyer Straight
Dish
... Restaurant Reviews
... Beer Reviews
Arts
... Previews
... Reviews
You get the idea.
Because they're set up in taxonomies, it's set up now so that if I go to the address www.oursite.com/news, it shows all the News articles (including VuePoint, Dyer Straight, etc...). Also, if you go www.oursite.com/news/vue-point, it shows all the VuePoint articles.
Now, development is still in early stages, but we know in the future we'll want to customize each parent sections (News, Dish, Arts...) with a feature story, more important articles at the top, etc... Standard fare for pretty much every news site out there.
Do we continue on basing our sections of taxonomy like we're doing, or should we create a separate View for each section? (we're using the Views module, if that wasn't already obvious) We do have seasonal section too (Hot Summer Guide, for instance), and if we went that way, we would need to make a separate View each time that section comes along. This could also get tedious if it's based off of a year too (Musicians Directory 2009, 2010, etc...)
If anybody has any suggestions, whether we continue basing sections off the default Taxonomy View, or a separate View for each section, or something completely different, that would be tremendous. Again, I'm new to Drupal so I'm quote open to suggestions you have.
Thanks in advance!
Comments
Right path
You're on the right path using taxonomy. When you get to the point where you want to transform the section pages into something with presentational control, you can use Panels in conjunction with Views (and perhaps some nodequeues).
We use Panels for managed pages like http://www.cjonline.com/sports but simpler taxonomy-driven views for deeper pages, such as http://www.jacksonville.com/sports/golf.
Modules that might be useful for newspapers
http://groups.drupal.org/node/5281
just wanted to share this link with all other drupalers
HI
HI trevorkjorlien
I was just wondering as how is your project coming along. I am trying to do something similar and wish if you can advise on following
"I am trying to create a newspaper site which has various sections. Each section will have its own homepage and select content from each section will be displayed on main home page.
The site will have a standard header with a navigation system where there will be one horizontal bar with main sections and second bar with child menu/ sub sections i.e something like navigation system as given in timesonline.co.uk
Now my question is how to build navigation system in Drupal ? using primary menu / secondary menu or using menu block or using taxonomy system. I also wish to display breadcrumbs. So kindly advise as how to go about it and take which path for building navigation system and use which modules to get this kind of navigation system.
I also wish to know as how to get a navigation header bar like times.co.uk where child navigation is not dropdown but fixed and displayed on clicking the parent link. Is it possible to build that using jquery? any module for that?"
It wll be great if you can guide