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Introduction to Drupal

Course Material

Week 4 - Tasks - Organizing your site

Heather James's picture
Tue, 2010-10-12 02:49

 How will your site visitors access your content? Through navigation on your site in the form of heirarchical or side menus, or perhaps through search.

Helping users find what they want as quickly as possible is the goal of information architecture, navigation and search. Drupal controls each of these aspects individually but you might be thinking of them as the one and the same thing. Where main navigation indicates a structure of content, you can also offer dynamic "more like this" links to bring people closer to their goal. There is also a bit of search engine optimization to consider as well, to ensure people land on the right place to begin with.

Often, in the Drupal community, these elements are considered in isolation; however, they affect the same aspects of your site. And it's very important to understand how these aspects work together *before* you begin building your site, because changing them in the future can be quite difficult.

Before you start

Review this "Anatomy of a Drupal Page" by Trellon
http://www.trellon.com/services/website_development/anatomy

Week 4 tasks

See the list of Site Organization tutorials below. This isn't an exhaustive list of all aspects of site organization, but it covers the essentials. 

  • 1. Search engine friendly-ness
  • 2. Menus
  • 3. Taxonomy
  • 4. More like this blocks
  • 5. On site search

Task 1: From the tutorials listed, select a minimum of 2 tutorials to practice, each under a different category of site organization. Start at the top of the list, and find the first two that are new to you.

Task 2: While you work on the tutorials, look at how the two aspects of site organization affect each other.

  • For example you may find that taxonomy affects how you can set a faceted search block in ApacheSolr.
  • Or you may find that the path system you set up affects how you can control block visibility based on paths & wildcards.

Share what you discover on the Week 4 Discussion Forum. Any warnings or tips to offer?

Tutorials on Site Organization in Drupal

1. Search engine friendly-ness

There are many ways Drupal can be search engine friendly right out of the box, and one important way you can improve it. It's important to think of your path strucutre early on, because changing it later can be quite difficult.

The Pathauto module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias.

2. Menus

Through both main navigation and sidebar menus, you can help people understand your site strucuture better. In Drupal you can create custom menus and assign them to specific regions, such as the left or right sidebar.

3. Taxonomy

Taxonomy and terms allow you to create explicit relationships between content without requiring the information to be indexed through search. You may have delved into CCK by now, and you might be wondering: When should I use a CCK field? When should I use Taxonomy? This has changed significantly in Drupal 7, because now terms can be added as CCK fields. But the question still remains....

4. More like this blocks

In addition to the Apache Solr module, which builds dynamic blocks based on a custom index, you can generate blocks based on taxonomy terms.

First ensure you know how blocks work: Understanding Drupal's Block System with Matt Petrowsky of Got Drupal http://blip.tv/file/1697696

5. On site search

Both on-site and search engine optimization are important. On site search creates a custom index of content on your site, and you control the relevance. You can also create navigational elements through menus which can help people narrow down their searches, and also find "more like this" dynamically.

The module Apache Solr offers more options for on-site search, with faceted search and "more like this" options. You can install this software on your own service or use a remote service as well.

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