NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

I'm playing with Joomla 1.6 and Drupal 7 on some sample sites [I'll post 
the url's in a few days once I build up content].

One of the things I am doing is looking on how to use Joomla 1.6 in a 
Drupal manner from a user perspective[not coding].

Drupal has 2 very interesting features, Nodes and Taxonomy.

Nodes:
Instead of "content" being the basic unit of measurement, Drupal has the 
concept of "Nodes".... a node is very similar to a content item, it has 
most of the fields a content item as....but it's not specifically 
content.  In Drupal, you then configure different "types" of content, 
basically extending the Node table[either by adding another table and 
linking it, or adding CCK fields to the content, etc].

Everything is stored in nodes + customization.

So an online store "component" does not neccessarily have an a product 
table and an order table.  Instead, it will have a Product Node Type, 
and an Order Node Type.  Only adding more tables if it can't be crammed 
into the existing Node structure.

This way each and every "item" in the Drupal world has it's own unique 
id/row in the node table.

They also setup by default a number of "friendly" content types such as  
"Blog", "Article", "Page"  these are all variations on the simple 
"content" item with slight tweaks, mostly on some default behaviors and 
permissions.  For example, on a magazine/social website "Pages" are the 
'about us' stuff and such.  So only site admins get permission to create 
those content types.  "Articles" are the news stuff so your authors, 
editors, and publishers have various rights there....and by default all 
new articles will go to the frontpage.  Wheras "Blog Entrees" could be 
open for any registered user to create - as all users get their own blog 
space.

Also each content type has friendly details for the end user telling 
them what sort of thing to post there, the rules for posting, etc.

So, there are 2 levels here.  One is that all "things" that get created 
in the normal course of a website have friendly, helpful 
information/guidance/permissions for the user.

The second is all "components" create nodes.

The first level is easily emulated in Joomla! 1.6 ...  simply create 
your categories for standardized pages, with permissions for different 
users and such.  So basicaly, here you are not using categories to 
describe the content of the document, but rather the purpose.  IE you 
don't create an article in the  "IPad" category, a subsection of 
"Gadgets"...  instead you create an article in the "Article" or perhaps 
"Review" category.

The second level requires buy in from extension developers to all agree 
to use the content structure as the base for as much functionality as 
they can...  So my goal is for a small sample site to stick to this 
model....all components use the content tables.

Taxonomy:
This Drupal item is rather interesting.  It began mainly as a free form 
tagging system.....with the added plus that you could have multiple 
"categories" of tags.  So you could have a tagging category which all 
users can add to/use to describe content.  You can also have a tagging 
category for the website authors to use to provide a more 
sophisticated/reliable set of tags for items[for example, users might 
tag an article as "shoes!", wheras fashion authors would tag it as 
"Manolo Blahnik, Fall 2010".  You can also create a taxonomy which is 
/never/ used for tagging anything and is merely a list of frequently 
used terms[for example, create an SEO taxonomy of terms to include in 
most pages and then have a script run against all submissions to let the 
writer know how many they used.  Or create a SPAM taxonomy of words to 
AVOID in content which will be emailed in order to avoid spam filters.]  
In Drupal 6 there were a number of extensions to Taxonomy, for example 
since Taxonomy was just a list of terms, there was a module that added a 
definition field - so now you could create a glossary.

For the longest time, in Joomla 1.5 the easiest  way to emulate this was 
to use Remository's Glossary component: 
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/living/education-a-culture/glossary/143  
And all in all it is a pretty sweeet component.

However, I REALLY want to stick as close to core as possible.  And the 
new Category system for content seems like a pretty good system for 
taxonomy.

All you have to do is create a parent "Category" with the permissions 
set so that /no one/ can create a content item in that category.  For 
example: "Freetagging" for tags.  Or "Tech Terms" for a glossary.  Every 
category has a description field which can be used to provide 
definitions of the term for glossary's or other information.  There is 
still work to be done to build components that build on this to provide 
management and user interfaces - yet all in all the basic design is 
sweeeeet in that at least a lot of this is already provided FOR us.

Give me a week or so and I'll post back on some reports of how well it 
is working out...  in the meantime I figured I'd solicit others opinions 
since my own ideas tend to get stuck in small caves of techno-babble.