It's the big 10 already! 10 editions of all these articles about design, Drupal and development, let's call them the big three D's. More D's will be added later (deployment, for instance), but right now, we are still in the Drupal phase focusing on services (content type), user profiles and votes.
If you want to read through the previous articles, you can do that through one of the following links:
- part 1 - Building a website A – Z
- part 2 - Colors, fonts and wires, creating the outlines
- part 3 - Mockups, wireframes and data
- part 4 - Of design, blocks and inspiration
- part 5 - Of standards, elements and blocks
- part 6 - Of installation and versioning
- part 7 - Of spots, responsive design and taxonomy
- part 8 - Of maps and updating core
- part 9 - Of galleries, forms and users
Of services and what it entails
I started with creating a new content type for something that I call 'Services'. This was the only term I could think of that would be a good term I can use (and one that users will understand) for everything that is not a diving spot; say for instance, a diving club, gear rental, hotel, boat rental. If you have a better way of describing all these things, please let me know.
This type of content is more focused on promoting the service that is being created and will subsequently be attached to the diving spots. I will have to think about some more about the criteria regarding this. I want to work with a radius, for example, everything in a radius of 10 - 20km of a diving spot being a possible relation to that diving spot; but that is something I have to think more about as well.
The 'service' content type is not really finished at this point and that is something I have to work more on in the future. For now, the basics are there. I created the content type, added a taxonomy (so the user can choose what kind of service it is, and added some options to it). I created the default view and configured the patterns for the URL aliases. The basics are there, and there will be more about it next week more.
Of profiles and what users should be able to show
I also did some work on the profiles for users. For now, there are only some basic fields available, like your first and last name and a profile picture, but I want to add more to the profiles, although not too much that nobody will fill out his or her profile. Also, I would like to add the option that the user can choose to basically show nothing on their profile or as much as they want.
What would you want to show on your profile? Diving gear that you use, places you have been, your favourite diving brands?
Of votes of showing relevant content
Showing relevant content seems to be an easy task when you first look at it, but these are things that large companies crack their brains about on a daily basis (Facebook, Google etc). What is interesting to users? I don't have the resources to spend on countless hours of refining my algorith - I am just one man after all and not a whole team, so we have to focus on a simpler algorithm for content. This would be something like:
high rated content + location near that of a user + locations user has been = possibly interesting information for that user
For now, I am just fine-tuning the voting system and creating the blocks that will just show simple, highly-voted content (views + rate module). In the future, I want to move towards pages where content is more focused towards the user; but that will take some time, as I first have to implement the basics before I can start with very specific user related content.
Bonus
Not a real bonus at this moment per se, but a part of Drupal that annoys me is that it will show its descriptions below the fields, and this takes up enormous amounts of space in forms because basically every field item needs some extra description; which is why I am working on a piece of code that will take that content and put it in a small icon like this (?). This means that when you interact with that icon, it will show you the description, like a tool-tip. When it is finished, I will link to it from this blog and you can then use it the way you want.