I'm vaguely competent in Drupal basics but I keep hitting a bit of a wall. I'm building a site that would allow people to log in, set themselves up as a provider or a consumer (so to speak), and fill in details about who they are or what they need. Then the site could suggest to the consumers what providers are in their area and might meet their needs. I'd also like to allow for commenting on providers and consumers and rating them.
I hope this isn't too vague, but that's the gist.
I assume that CCK is an important choice for this site along with a number of the modules in the CCK world, that I'm not confused about. I think even the commenting and rating part I can figure out, it's just a matter of the right modules.
Where keep hitting the wall is after I create the fields and start building the forms. I'm obviously missing something on how to present them and how to use Views as part of this process, as I have the feeling that I need Views but I'm not even 100% certain that I do.
I also realize that the proximity issue should be fun, maybe I can get that kind of information through the Google maps API or something. But first things first.
Comments
The basics for data drive sites
Hi Deele
Sounds like you are well on your way. The general process for building up a data driven site would be
1a voting w 5 star provides a cck field for the rating http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/fivestar
1b commenting - use the core drupal comment system to handle comments on users (unless you want to bind the rating and the comment, in which case you will have to do this all a bit differently)
2 once you have the data types, start to build up the VIEWS of the data.
This screenast shows how to build views related to the rating http://www.lullabot.com/videocast/building-views-fivestar-and-votingapi
some views you might want to use could be "Recent Providers" "Recent Consumers", "Featured Provider", "Highest Rated Provider" and so on
3 Theme the site to make it look like the visual design you are going for, in my experience is often best to build all the views and the same content before you start themeing, that way you know what you are trying to achieve as an outcome before getting into the theme layer.
Hope this helps
-M
As I play around with making
As I play around with making the site (the screencast was very helpful, thanks! it really helped my understanding of how to use Views) I'm realizing that yes, I definitely want to bind the ratings and the comments.
And as I type this I'm realizing that part of the rating/trust stuff between users is that I probably need a social networking aspect that allows people to say and confirm that they've done business. Otherwise just anyone could do a rating on anyone and that's kind of pointless.
Dang I thought this was going to be relatively simple. I should know better, I never do simple!
What would be your suggestions?
Fivestar Comment
Just to expand on what Mack mentioned re:comments, if you want people to rate as part of the comment, you can use the "Fivestar Comments" module that's included with Fivestar. Just enable the module, and you'll see some comment options under the five star settings when you edit the content type that you want to have ratings for.
Yes, you definitely need to
Yes, you definitely need to and should use the Views module.
Users as nodes?
I'm no expert on this area at all, but it seems to me like you want people to be able to add comments, ratings etc to user profiles, rather than (or as well as) content that those users create. In which case I believe you may run into problems if you use the default core 'profile' module. You may wish to look at:
http://drupal.org/project/content_profile (drupal 6)
or
http://drupal.org/project/nodeprofile (drupal 5)
which will open up CCK and possibly other modules (comments?, fivestar?) to user profiles.
Again, I'm no expert in this area, haven't really used these modules, so maybe some other drupallers can comment/assist. I could be reading this wrong also!
Cheers!
Content profile
I recommend using content profile to make your users into nodes, that way you can handle them like you would any other content types.
-M
Also recommending content_profile
I agree, this module makes things pretty simple. I worked with the d5 version and it seemed pretty easy to use, you just add fields as you would a content type and the module handles associating it a user and presenting the merged form (standard bio + node). If/when you decide to do some programming with it you will have to load both the user profile and the corresponding node to get all of the information.
Right now I've got CCK with
Right now I've got CCK with a number of field types loaded, content profile, views, and fivestar as the major relevant modules.
Limit one node per type
No need to use content profile module. Just limit one node per type. A simple module can do the work.