Posted by Merlin on Wed, 06/28/2006 - 10:16pm

Irritated pastries? Cranky pastries? No, maybe just stark raving mad pastries? Hm. Well it’s so hard to tell. When the donuts get riled up, they really can cause a ruckus, though.

A ruckus like this one, for example. Technorati pointed this one out for me, and with that title, how could I not click on it?

Hey Elaine, I tried to comment on your post, but for some reason your Wordpress install doesn’t seem to believe that being logged in is actually logged in. So, uh. This is like commenting on your post, since I figure you’re probably actually reading me now that I’m in your blog roll.

First: Thanks! I love to be recognized.

Second:

  • Nodes are content. In Drupal, that means it’s your pages, forum posts, blog posts, events…in general it’s a relatively generic object that can be used for multiple purposes, but in general those purposes are content.
  • CCK is a module that lets you customize nodes by adding the fields you like. It’s still a little bit immature.
  • Taxonomy is a method of classifying those nodes; because it can be used hierarchically, it is often used for much more than mere classification. Image Galleries and Forums use taxonomy as galleries and forum containers, for example. Some sites use taxonomy as structure. There are some very cool uses for that, in fact.
  • Views is a module that lets you list your nodes (content) however you like. For example, my blog page lists posts reverse chronologically. Another lists articles reverse chronologically. Another alphabetically. Those are all views. Views has an intimidating UI that lets you select all that and builds the query for you. Views is starting to get mature, but it’s an infant compared to some other stuff out there, but it’s a pretty good package in Drupal. Of course, I wrote it, so naturally I’m going to tell you that it’s good. Or in geek lingo it’s ++good.

 

Blog
·

Comments

Submitted by Elaine (not verified) on Thu, 06/29/2006 - 12:23pm

Sorry my WordPress install was being buggy. I saw that you registered and I was wondering why you would register and not comment. Now I know why. I've had, like, 3 comments so far so I haven't had the opportunity for much troubleshooting...yet.

Thanks so much for your insights. I feel like I have a long way to go, especially considering the size of the project that I am working on, so I really appreciate you taking a moment to clarify things for me.

I was wondering, regarding the sites that use taxonomy as structure...could you point out one or two to me? Is there any way to tell from an end-user view that taxonomy is used this way or is this only something that is obvious to a developer? And if you'll pardon another n00b question, is Views something that only a developer would use? Or would your average user have access to it? I can see it being very useful (and it will definitely be part of my first install). I can't resist something that gives me more control over data presentation. :)

So I will be lurking here from now on, trying to soak up the wisdom. And I love your "about" page...a little sillyness goes a long way when dealing with computers...or donuts.

Submitted by Merlin on Thu, 06/29/2006 - 1:10pm

Ha! So Wordpress isn't perfect after all! Ok maybe I'll give it a pass on this one.

An example of taxonomy as structure is jewishcenter.org which lets content creators tag their posts as 'classes' or 'young leadership' etc and then it just shows up in the right section.

To answer the second half of that question, I'm going to break Drupal users into 3 groups.

  • End users -- these are people who use or do administrative tasks on Drupal, but don't really know much about building sites with it.
  • Site Designers -- These are people who use Drupal for site design, and are not necessarily coders. Right now, some PHP skill is almost mandatory to really make your site complete but you can do a lot of cool stuff without it.
  • Developers -- people who can roll up their sleeves, dig into Drupal's guts, and make things go almost like magic.

Taxonomy, once set up properly, is usable by end users. It needs to be set up by a site designer. It's difficult to understand, because the terminology and basic philosophy isn't in the same paradigm as most site design, so it takes awhile to get one's brain to wrap around it.

Views is very much a site designer tool. It doesn't require any development to use all its basic stuff, it does require a little PHP to get the most out of it, to use some of its theming and its more advanced features.

To give you a little to think about:

This site uses taxonomy somewhat for structure. I have a vocabulary I created and called 'section'. It has two terms: "Blog" and "Article".

Posts tagged as "blog" are blog posts, and you can guess what the other term is used for.

Views makes all this work for me. If you click 'Blog' or 'Articles' above, Views controls the pages that follow. The blocks on the right that give mini views are also Views-powered: Recent Blog Entries, Recent Articles and Archive.

Submitted by Ramdak (not verified) on Thu, 06/29/2006 - 10:11pm

I submitted a comment on your site but it disappeared, so I figured I would post here. With all your interest in taxonomy, I just wanted to point you to the category module, which addresses some of the limitations of taxonomy and book modules:
www.nicklewis.org/node/851

Submitted by Elaine (not verified) on Thu, 06/29/2006 - 11:05pm

Yes, it was the middle definition of site designer that I was missing (which is what I am, apparently). Thanks for the explanation and the examples...they go a long way to helping me with that head-wrapping thing.

BTW, a kind reader left a link to this article regarding the categories module. Do you have an opinion on the category module?

Submitted by Merlin on Fri, 06/30/2006 - 8:37am

Category module has come up often as a topic of conversation on #drupal lately, the developer's IRC. I have only just taken a glance at it, but it does a lot of the things that I think need to be done. It doesn't do everything I think need to be done (for example, categories don't replace forums at all; I think it needs its own forum module in order to accomplish this). And I was told that the same is true of the image_gallery.module, which relies on taxonomy.

I think category.module is a good intermediate step. There's some minor discussion over whether/how to do something like that in Drupal core as we move forward. Eaton is putting some thought and work into it, and if we're lucky, perhaps something will come of it.

Add new comment