Hey all!
I'm designing my first drupal site. It's for a local bike shop in town. I'm testing out drupal for this site because if all goes well, I'll implement it for an upcoming site I'll be working on for a local church.
My site should be fairly simple. My home page will look different than my other pages. The home page just serves to have a static welcome message, followed by a plethora of info such as the latest top three blog posts (just teasers, user clicks for full read), two featured products (again just teasers but also a thumbnail of the product), the next upcoming event, the latest piece of news and a link to the site's photo gallery.
When someone clicks on a story or event, that will have a completely different look to the site. It'll keep the same header, but their will be a left side bar region, the content region and the footer.
First up, do I have to have the default drupal regions on my home/front page? Because I was just looking at having a header, content body and footer.
When setting up my front page, my content body will probably have several child css divs and I'm guessing I can just put in my php call content script where I want in my home page php file so it appears in the div I want it to? Considering I'll have several different pieces of content, I'll have to sort through taxonomy. I'll mainly have just a static welcome message that only appears on the front page, then the following different types of content: news, blog entries, featured products, and events. How would I correctly define those and after defining them, is there a specific way to make for instance, the news content appear on my home page (probably only 1-2 stories)? I read about nodes and views and I just get really confused. Sorry for the long message - I'm sure I'll be on this forum a lot for the next few days.
If you'd like to see what the basic home page will look click here.
Get ready for a long and arduous journey...
... fraught with peril! To answer your questions, yes, you can do all that. you create a separate tpl.php file for your front page. Views is what you need to use for putting news content on your front page. As far as telling Drupal what constitutes "news"... You can either create a content type that is called news, with the Content Construction Kit Module, or you can use the Taxonomy module to tell Drupal this is a "News" node. The Views module will then use either taxonomy terms, or node types to decide what you display on your front page.
Here's a little Drupal 101. Drupal functions are performed by "modules." Some come with the core download (referred to as "Core"), others are called "contributed modules" and can be found on the Drupal website. So, if you want your website to do something, you hunt around on the modules page and find one that does what you need. Drupal stores the website content in a database, and when the info is served up as a page, it is called a "node." Nodes constitute (for the most part) the unique data that is on a page. Blocks, headers, footers, and other regions are not usually nodes.
Two contributed modules you need to get to know very well: The Content Construction Kit (CCK), and Views. They have good documentation on the Drupal Website. Almost every Drupal site in existence needs these two modules.
Blessings,
Tony
Anthony Pero
Minister of Music
Lima First Assembly of God
http://www.limafirstmedia.com/
http://www.anthonypero.com/boo...
http://www.worshipnexus.org
Thanks Tony! I've heard of
Thanks Tony! I've heard of CCK but haven't really looked into it much. Views is another thing that I should probably brush up on.
I'm pretty sure that this is def going to be a long, tedious journey but I think it'll pay off in the long run! Thanks again!
I think that the drupal
I think that the drupal community is so pleased with cck and views that it can sometimes overshadow the importance of core features. I've run into this a bit. Taxonomy can do much of what I've used cck for in the past. I'm hoping someone might share how to properly balance the cross-over of the 2 features.
Also D6 views is so much cooler than views module for D5. The interface is incredible.
There is another module you may want to watch for your purposes, but isn't out yet for Drupal 6. That is the panels module. It will allow you to organize content on the page in the way you want.