php - How to organise content in Drupal?

Question

I want to set up a website containing 3 categories: movies, books and articles. And want every have menu item and subpage that features best content from the category. In every category i want to have articles, videos and galleries. I want every category page to look different, so with articles, videos and galleries from different categories.

In Drupal i can create "categories", "views" and "sections". I dont want to make a mistake on the design chosen. So my question is what methods of mentioned in last sentence should i use and in what order to organize the content i will have in a proper way?

Answer 1

Taxonomy terms describe and categorize content while Content Types define specific attributes of that content.

Generally you will want to divide your content into Content Types and Taxonomy. A content type is a way to divide content by what fields that content contains. Movies, Books, Articles, Videos (in your case... maybe), all sound like potential Content Types in your system.

You'd then want to add Taxonomy Vocabularies to each content type (categories). Examples of these would be as simple as "Article Contains" with terms like "Video", "Photos", "External Content".

I suggest you do not use 'articles' in both places. Call the taxonomy term something more like 'text' or 'written'. As long as you divide content this way, your pages will be flexible. You can create pages that display content from a single content type and single category or a page with All content types and a single category. You maintain flexible data this way.

Answer 2

As always there are many different ways to do this in Drupal - and the right way depends on the context but usually anything to do with classification should be suggesting taxonomys.

In Drupal content types are best used when the actual content is different - from your description it sounds rather like the content will be similar - but I do find your question confusing.

So, if your content has the same fields needs to be classified into a category you'll use one content type with at least a new term reference field that you will create to hold the reference to the taxonomy vocabulary. This one content type will hold all of the content related to movies, books and articles.

If your content will contain different fields then you'll need a content type for each of movies, books and articles.

You will need to setup views for each of the taxonomy - as this is a good way to get a block that you can put onto the sidebar. Remember that block contents can be dynamic but blocks cannot (easily) take parameters so the dynamicness of the content needs to be driven by something else.

Sections aren't something that I've used - I've generally found it much better to understand and use the taxonomy - especially seeing as all too often it is necessary to have one content in two taxonomy vocabularies.

Setting up a view for each taxonomy vocabulary will give blocks. Views is great and needs to be understood.

You can setup a view for a taxonomy (block & page) - I generally use panels to build specific pages presentations using a view of a taxonomy vocabulary (e.g. this one) which links through to the taxonomy term which is a page using a path (/taxonomy/term/%) with a grid view.