Posted by ithacaindy on May 3, 2010 at 2:32pm
After considering switching from OP to another Drupal platform, I wistfully looked at other sites built on Openpublish. After checking out The New Republic, and seeing they make do without drop-down menus, I fixed my database and have squelched my desire for individual section "landing pages."
Question: How do I replace the staid "Sports Articles" message that appears when readers select the "Sports" primary menu item with a graphic, akin to TNR's?
Thanks, Ed
Comments
I can understand doing away
I can understand doing away with secondary menus. However, I still think that you can have a landing page for sports articles. It's really about setting up a taxonomy system and views.
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Right now, I have a taxonomy
Right now, I have a taxonomy that branches off of articles; for instance, "articles/play" is the taxonomy for my sports page. I've discovered I can use that path to trigger a context for my sports page, including displaying a section sub-menu for links to scores and such. My next step is to find a way to create a view that lists all of my recent sports articles in a sidebar when people go to the sports section.
Can you suggest how I could create a landing page for various sections? After sports, I need to tackle our entertainment section, which would involve displaying articles, blocks and blogs related to movies, music and restaurants.
That /play in the URL can be
That /play in the URL can be passed to views as an 'argument' which functions like a dynamic filter. In Views filter you can choose taxonomy term and select the terms to filter. With the argument the term is pulled from the URL and that is used to filter the view.
Realizing how arguments work in Views is the second best thing to realizing Zen, that everything is the world is One.
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Interesting. This is
Interesting. This is definitely an education. I knew next to nothing about Views when I started out; now I know a little bit more than that. What book would you recommend for understanding Drupal's Views and their practical applications?
Using Drupal
Using Drupal http://www.usingdrupal.com/. Views is also a very good way to start to learn MySQL. A little knowledge of MySQL will help understanding Views too so a book like MySQL for Dummies or the small guide published by Sun Microsystems can help.
If two tables share the same field in the database. For example, one table has a column NID and another table has a column NID Views can join those two tables together using relationships. If one content type has a CCK text field 'city' and another content type uses that text field again, they both share a table where they can be joined with Views relationships.
It helps to understand relationships in VIEWS are JOIN commands in mysql, filters are WHERE clauses, and sorts or ORDER BY clauses, and fields in VIEWS is the SELECT command.
Drupal menu system is based on the idea of arguments, anything after the / in the URL. I started understanding that concept after reading Drupal Pro Development (which I still have very little understanding about) and Drupal Module Development books.
It's nice to know that all this connected data in database can be queried through views.
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