There are so many approaches for creating and maintaining a Drupal site. Panopoly looks to have done a great job of identifying the best collection of modules and bundled them into a distribution.
I have read lots and watched the development of Drupal for a number of years. I have little problem getting Drupal or Panopoly installed. I have run an internal Drupal 6 site and migrated it to Drupal 7. The concepts of doing things make sense during the read, but for some reason or another the implementation details seem to always have several challenges for me.
It seems like I am must missing fundamentals that is preventing a satisfying deployment. Maybe it is by background of being more of a systems guy that a web developer. Either way I would appreciate any assistance in helping get my mind Into the current mindset for more of a panels based Drupal deployment.
I am trying to create an IT department web resource. Some might call it an intranet or portal or even a knowledge base. Each of these terms have different meanings to me so i am avoiding using these classifications.
To begin with, what I would like to construct is a site with a collection of topic pages that are geared to get the viewer to the relevant material quickly. I would like the topic pages to have a similar consistency to help aid the viewer in quickly getting to what they desire.
The key focus of this site is for support staff to quick access to access regular tasks, reference and how to information. If you take the example of a Unix or Windows operations support staff, both generally have regular types of performed activities. These topic categories could be Email, DNS, ldap/ad, time services, Windows ops, Unix/Linux Ops, application1' application2, etc. Each of these services/categories could have a overview, regular tasks section, a reference section, frequent questions, project section.
So the question is, keeping the above in mind, should each section be a unique content type or should taxonomy terms be used?
The issue is that there can be lots of documents in each section and that can quickly make it difficult to find what is desired. We have this problem now, we are not using panels and instead use views and taxonomy terms. The result is content grouped by taxonomy terms with no real navigation or ease of use.
Guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
Using the menu to organize the information into a heirarchy?
This wouldn't necessarily solve your problems - it's just another idea to consider and/or try - but have thought about using the menu to organize the information into a heirarchy?
So, this would just involve creating menu items for each of the documents, so you could have a tree like:
- Windows Ops-- ActiveDirectory
--- Overview
--- Regular Tasks
--- Reference
--- FAQ
And then you could put a menu block in the sidebar which displays the part of the tree you're currently in.
Anyway, all that said, there really isn't one right way to do this! Using content types or taxonomy or entity reference fields or the menu are all valid options and which one you choose has more to do with personal preference and the other modules you'd like to integrate with, rather than one approach being objectively better than any other. I think you could make any of them work!
I hope that helps!