Planning our site
We now have a basic understanding of how Drupal works, and what the various aspects of its administration section do. So let's now start planning our site!
When working on new, interesting, and exciting projects, such as a new website like this one, it is often tempting to jump right in at the deep end and start building the site. But that would be a bad idea. If we planned our website and its content carefully, then we should be able to offer our visitors a much better social network than we would if we just went straight into creating the site.
Let us first focus on the content we create for our site, as opposed to the content our users will create for us. This way we can prepare the site and its preliminary content and structure, and then begin to think about how our users are going to interact and contribute. This also allows us to try and contain the non-community aspect of the site. We set up this content now, so that we can focus on our users and build a true social network in the rest of the book!
Static content
Content which isn't going to change very often is generally referred to as static content, and might include content such as a page describing the history of a company. For our site, a social network for dinosaur owners, the following can almost certainly be classified as static content:
- Contact us: A postal address and e-mail address to get in touch with us, the owners of the website
- About us: About the website and the people behind it
- Legal information: Terms and conditions, privacy policy, copyright notice, and so on
Note
It is now difficult to categorize any other content for this particular site as static content. We may wish to provide some generic information on dinosaurs, but since this is a social network, and our users are the experts, we should let them contribute to the site. So I think it is best to leave the static content limited to the information mentioned earlier.
Grouping content
We looked at taxonomy earlier when we had a brief tour of Drupal's administration features and observed that it was a great way to classify content. Certain content can be clearly classified with our DinoSpace site, such as forum posts, pages, or generic content about specific breeds of dinosaurs. We can create tags for each specific breed such as:
- T-Rex
- Pterodactyl
- Triceratops
These terms would be grouped together as Dinosaur breed.