on drupal, part three
[Start here. Then go here. Then come back here.]
Right. Sorry about the delay in getting back to this series of posts. You might remember that in part two, I talked at length about the wonders of CCK. The one thing I wanted to pick up on in this post (to round of the CCK discussion) is how CCK makes site administration a lot easier.
If you’re already sold on Drupal, I probably don’t need to tell you how advantageous it is to separate your site’s content from other elements like design, architecture, and navigation. Indeed, this is the promise of most content management systems. CCK facilitates that by allowing you to build input forms that your content folks can use to create pages really easily. So, when a content editor logs into the site, he/she sees a form with clearly defined fields to fill in, which is so much better than being confronted with one large input box in which to dump the entire contents of a page.
The other neat thing about CCK is that it works with Drupal’s permissions to allow you to control access around content type. To pick up on the subject guide example I used in part two, you could grant your subject/liaison librarians permission to create and edit the subject guide content type (and any other content type that is pertinent to their work). Setting up permissions around content type means that when your content folks log into the site, they will be able to edit and create just the content types you have given them permission to edit and create (nothing more or less). At my library, this comes in particularly handy since almost everyone is responsible for some content on the site (for real).
Now, it would be remiss of me not to come clean about how long it took me to come up with this little scheme to manage permissions on our site. I won’t tell you how many sleepless nights (seriously) led to such a revelation, but suffice it to say that this did not fall into place seamlessly for me. Which is not to say that I invented the notion of controlling permissions based on content types (I, most certainly, did not), nor is it to say that this is the only way to control permissions on your site (it isn’t), but this is what I’m using for our site (along with the Account Types module) and it is working fairly well. If you’re administering permissions on Drupal using some other method, I’d love to hear about it.
OK, next up: a final wrap-up post on other must-have modules and some overall lessons learned. It shouldn’t take me another month to get around to it (as it did with this post), but, you know, no promises.
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