Drupal!

[atad6]

After a few days of much struggling, I think I've finally had my "a ha" moment with drupal. I got what It had the potential to do, that's why I decided to use drupal, but I never really understood how the system worked. I'm still at the tip of the ice burg but I'm starting to get how powerful the abstract/fluid nature of nodes and taxonomy combined with modules such as views can be.

At the moment I have a few questions:

1. On my homepage I want to have two boxes, each box would contain the teaser from the most recent story in a given category. Would the best way to do this be to setup two different blocks using views and have those blocks appear only on a certain empty page which could be set as the front page?

2. Can someone explain to me exactly what the CCK module lets you do.

3. What is the best way to get image support in Drupal? Right now I have image and image assist enabled in conjunction with tinyFCE. None of these modules work with Drupal 6 so would it be best to use 5 and upgrade later?

 

[ambient]

Hi,

Pretty sure making a View using the Views Module will be the best way to solve problem 1 - click provide as block in the view options and they you can put it in as a normal block.

CCK allows you make custom fields and content types which can be very powerful. There is a image button in the MCE editor. Drupal 6 doesnt have very many modules or addons you mite be best to sticking to 5 for the time being.

 

[smirking]

Regarding your setup of your homepage, the easiest way to integrate two different blocks of content is to use the Insert Views module. This allows you to define each of your two "blocks" as different views. You'd then call each view using [view:myViewName] and it'll insert the view right there.

You could set various elements to appear when a certain path is hit (i.e. mysite.com/front/), but using Insert Views to do it gives you more control over the layout and look of the page.

I'd stick to Drupal 5 for now unless you're an expert PHP coder. It wasn't that long ago that Drupal 5 was released. It seems like the Drupal community just got done with migrating modules from 4.7 to 5 when 6 got announced. Drupal 6 came a little too soon for my tastes. I can't be the only coder who works with Drupal who isn't ready to let go of 5 yet.

The Drupal core functionality for Drupal 6 doesn't seem that different from the Drupal 5 core from the end user standpoint. Some features that were previously available only through modules like CCK have been integrated into the core, but it just didn't seem that different to me when I installed it as a trial. Supposedly, 6 is better from a coder's point of view. I haven't spent any time swimming in Drupal 6 code, so I can't verify if this is true. I'm not even going to touch Drupal 6 code until some books come out on it later this year.