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Organising content with Drupal

We are used to:

  • Wikis
  • conventional web sites
 
Drupal offers:
  • conventional website structure using links and url aliases
  • basic Drupal organisation of articles and stories that are published to list pages
  • blogs - Blogs are owner-centric (the owner adds an entry others may comment) and chronologically ordered. It does make for a good diary, log or scientific notebook but isn't really a good documentation or even discussion system for a common project because articles and discussions about the project are scattered in individual blogs. MM and JM started documenting what they did with the Drupal site using blogs. We did introduce the sitedev blog tag to deal with this but then JM created the web site admin group that classifies entries and controls access. So the group collects the relevant entries together but they could start in any group member's blog.
  • forums - designed for discussions - they are owned by a group though administrators have ultimate control. Ideal for raising a topic for discussion that everybody in the group can add to. Can be used in a blog like manner for a user make announcement - others can comment. Not ideal for end documentation because the discussion within a florum are not structured (or only as responses). It would, e.g.,  be good for discussion on how to organise SimileXML content.
  • Books - pages with hierrachical structure (sections (chapters)) makes adding pages easy but webs of links have to be specified manually
  • Groups - controls access to content that may be in any form, blog, book, project, ordinary page. Also gathers information accessible to that group - the group page lists content, newest at the top.
Groups
  • Web site admin
    • book for reference
    • blog entries can be made accessible to the group
    • forum for discussions?
  • SimileXML
    • book for reference
    • forum for discussions?
    • blog entries can be made accessible to the group