I've recently been tasked with putting together a Drupal Site that will be used to provide students with steps on what it takes to complete their Technical Training at our College. We're not a traditional College—we are open-entry/open-exit and as such our students don't usually work together on the same things at the same time. The student needs to be able to log-in and gain access to materials exclusive to the classes or program that they are enrolled in. This part is pretty much done without any problems. The problem I'm having is on the actual page that has the list of items that need to be accomplished in order to complete the course/program. The person wants them listed in groups by "Modules" (not a Drupal Module :] ). This part I was able to accomplish with the views_accordion module. It's doing the job very well and displaying lists of nodes that have been referenced back to the node using the node_reference module. I was even able to use the flag module to allow the student to check each item off the list as the go along.
So, here's my question: At this point my plan is to make each item on the checklist be it's own node. This is primarily so that I can turn this site over the Instructional Team so that they can add/modify/delete content freely and without many problems. The problem is that this site could become really large over time and possibly include 300 different courses with 30-40 checklist items altogether on each page. Am I asking for it by having each piece of curriculum a node?
(If the above doesn't make sense check out the attached JPG of the Modules section on my node pages)
Sorry if this is confusing, it's really difficult to explain. If a lot of people are confused then I can try and put together screencast using iShowU.
Screenshots aren't attaching for some reason so here they are: Course Modules, Screenshot.
Comments
I guess my explanation was
I guess my explanation was too complicated...
Here's an update on the project: I decided that having a node for each item on the checklist was definitely too much to handle due to scalability issues down the road. What I'm doing now is using a node for each Module list. So, there's a module node for Module 1, Module 2, etc. It turns out a lot better this way. The only trick was getting some sort of checklist like the flag module. I found the ajax_checklist module to solve that problem. It's a little more work to get the checkbox on the page, but all in all I think that the curriculum department will be able to handle it. It tracks the completed requirements in the database on a per-user basis. The only trick that I'm running into now is finding a way to allow the user to print the page with the "accordions" expanded. I'll update when I find something. If anyone else has another other ideas then feel free to comment. :)
Andrew (amariotti)
Andrew (amariotti)