Jim O’Halloran’s Weblog

Published September 1st, 2005 by Jim O'Halloran

Drupal Content Management System

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently with various Content Management Systems. The CMS that’s really caught my eue though is Drupal. I first tried to install Drupal 2 or more years ago, and could not get things up and running at all. Since then though things have changed considerably, I played with Drual a bit on OpenSourceCMS.com, and liked what I saw. Then downloaded a copy and tinkered with it some more.

The more I play the more I like it, but I was having problems getting some sort of navigation happening. The Drupal site had two examples of using taxonomies to create a block containing navigation information from a taxonomy.

• Block containing all items from a certain term. - Create a term to house all pages of a certain type (e.g. News), and this blck will list all items belonging to that term.
• Block containing all terms and nodes in a taxonomy. - Create a taxonomy describing your entire site, and this block will build a nice hierachial menu. This does require a patch to the taxonomy module, which I had to apply by hand, but that wasn’t a major hasle.

These’s also quite a few modules I’ve found handy:

• AdminBlock - I’m looking at moderation features, and this creates a block containing all of the items awaiting moderation.
• Diff - Diff shows the differences between revisions of a node. Very cool, some PHP5 issues though.
• Scheduler - Allows for scheduled publication/removal of items.

I really need to wrap my head around the taxonomy stuff a little more, but I’m starting to understand it. Features I like, multiple sites on one installation, moderation/access control is very good. I’m yet to experiment with themeing in any meaningful way.

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