I'm new to Drupal but thanks to our old friend O'Reilly I'm blazing through my own taxonomy-based, navigational search-paradigmed menu in Drupal 6. Using only Core modules at the moment (I don't want to unnecessarily complicate things), I am building a Primary nav menu which pulls several taxonomy terms together.
Now I know that I can implement AND by using the URL /taxonomy/term/1,2 and I can implement OR by using the URL /taxonomy/term/1+2. What I need to do is essentially an AND plus an OR, and I've tried the following URLs, neither of which works:
/taxonomy/term/1,7+8
/taxonomy/term/1/7+8
What I'd like to say here is "show me all nodes tagged with term 1, AND also show me all nodes tagged with EITHER terms 7 OR 8. I've tried searching Drupal and Google and even StackOverflow, but as you can imagine search terms like AND and OR really suck for results.
All comments, especially those concerning best practice, gratefully received. I would prefer not to have to resort to a module at this stage; I'm trying to get as far as I can through the site before I begin chucking modules at a wall. ;)
I'm going to use the Drupal 6 module Views 2 to fulfil these requirements, so this question can be closed.
Related
We currently have a staging website, which has an IP address like xx.xx.xxx.xxx and we would like to have integrated and tested GCS on it before pushing it live. Is it possible?
Otherwise, is there any alternative to GCS to add a search bar in a Jekyll blog without using plugin?
Thanks!
PART I: Google
Google custom search cannot index an application that isn't available to the internet.
No, that's not entirely true. You can arrange something with Google (in theory, never done it) but it doesn't look easy. Or cheap.
You could set up a custom search for an unrelated site and embed those results in your local page, if you want to test out CSS prior to launch.
Remember, Google Custom Search also comes with ads, unless you pay. And the results tend to look like they came from Google.
PART II: Alternatives
I've looked into this extensively and I haven't come up with a good answer. Here are some not-so-good answers:
1) Tapir Search. This actually worked pretty well, but appears to have died. They do have recent twitter activity, however, so maybe worth checking back in a bit. twitter. It's basically a (free) front end for an elasticsearch server. I think. Neat service, obviously not super-dependable.
2) Go javascript. Lunr for example. There are many, many similar solutions available. Sadly, they are client-side and doing a full-text search on even a smallish blog type site can be very slow. Works okay if you limit the search to titles, but then...you're only searching titles.
3) Build a search engine server. Maybe some breed of Lucene. Upside: very robust search while keeping the snappy response of a flat HTML site. Downside: building and maintaining a search engine server is difficult, expensive and probably overkill.
4) Hosted search engine. Algolia for example. They're basically doing 3) for you. Relatively expensive (~$50/month) but well worth the cost, because, seriously, search engine servers are finicky and prone to explosions. I've never gone this route with Jekyll because I've never had a Jekyll project I was quite that serious about, but I did consider it.
If anyone has anything to add, I'd love to hear it. This question has been irritating me for a while.
I am wondering if there is a standard pre-built web application for Rails which has all the basic functionalities like user login, user profiles, profile image uploader, comments, search, maybe payments and a set of other usual web application features all bundled and ready to use and extend.
I like how Twitter bootstrap comes with a set of pre-built interface functionalities and styles, which you can start using and modify later. I am looking for something similar that can allow me to quickly set up a working application and go from there.
Does such a framework exist?
There are numerous examples out there.
However, there are two things you should really do:
Read the license to make sure you can use it they way you are thinking of using it.
Ensure you understand the design decisions and choices the original authors made. You will end up in a world of maintenance pain if you just copy cargo-cult style without understanding the tradeoffs others have made with their design decisions.
Any one of the links listed has enough to get you started. They may not have all of the features you listed but together they probably have all of your bases covered. You will have to put in some effort to get all those features working together though.
The RailsApps project is great because they all have tutorials that walk through the basic setup. They are also all built using the Rails Composer tool, which lets you pick and choose certain options for your app.
I'm searching for something of which I don't really know the name of.
From time to time, I have to develop a small tool for a small group of users which is basically a web frontend to one or two database tables. It's very basic and something which one could do in a spreadsheet (without the problem that only one user can have the file open at a time and something like Sharepoint is not available) or for what one would have chosen MS Access in the 90s. Google Docs would also be possible, but we'd like to keep our data in-house. (I for myself just use phpMyAdmin for that, but it's not suitable for not tech-savvy end-users.)
So I'm looking for a tool which generates/provides a forms-based Web interface for simple models or database schemes that I create. First, is there a common name for such a thing? And second, does anyone have recommendations (preferably open source and/or free)? The closest thing I've come to is the scaffold generator in Ruby on Rails, but it's very basic and not optimal since it's only designed for generating prototype could which one should edit later, and last time I have looked at it, it was not possible to differently updating your model, i. e. regenerate code for model changes but preserving the manual changes of your code.
Thank you.
You're looking for Web UI Framework. Look into http://agiletoolkit.org/
(A while back I read this great post: http://aaronlongwell.com/2009/06/the-ruby-on-rails-cms-dilemma.html, discussing the "Rails CMS Dilemma". It describes conceptual approaches to managing content in websites vs web apps. I'm still a beginner with Rails, but had a bit of a PHP background, and I still have trouble wrapping my brain around this.
A lot of what I run into is customers who want a website that is not 100% website, and not 100% web app... That is, perhaps there are several pages of business-to-public facing content, but then there are application elements, and the whole overall look is supposed to be cohesive. This was always fairly simple in PHP, as you just kind of dropped your app code into the PHP "script", etc (though I know there are plenty of cons to this platform and approach).
So I am wondering, what is the best approach in Rails for doing this?
Say you have an application with user authentication and some sort of CRUD stuff going on, where users collaborate on projects or something. Well, what is the optimal approach for managing the text/images of the "How This Site Works" and "Our Company" pages, which people may also want to view? Is it just simply having a pages controller and several text fields, with an admin panel on the back end that lets you edit those fields? Or is it perhaps a common approach to start off with something like Refinery, and then build on top of it for the non-content-driven areas of a site?
Sorry if this is a dumb question. It's just that I've read Hartl's book and others, and they never address this practical low-level stuff for a beginner... Sure, I can build a Twitter feed now, but what Twitter's "About" page (http://twitter.com/about)? I can't just throw text into a view and give that to a client... They want a super easy way to see the site tree, edit content areas, AND administrate/run their Twitter feed or whatever.
Thanks for your help.
I think you're looking for a CMS that runs as a plugin in your Rails application. If that's the case, I'd suggest that you try http://github.com/twg/comfortable-mexican-sofa
I have a relatively simple site on my hands, and have for nearly a year, but I can't seem to find a platform to build it on that doesn't fight back at the way I want to do things. Here are the key features:
Customizable profiles. Profile tags.
Two primary content types: Haves & Wants
Both content types searchable/taggable and expire with a "Taken" symbol if user chooses.
Private messaging.
Daily cron attempts to find matches of Haves and Wants with similar tags and uses email alerts.
I think I can understand the logic of building this in Rails... but I'm too much of a noob to execute it. Is there a easier framework or cms out there that can produce something like this?
Additional information: We currently are using a modified version of the Classipress template for wordpress. It got us a little ways through development... but we can't seem to convince wordpress to post more than one type of content or tags. http://mybarterhub.com/
I wouldn't attempt something like this on Wordpress (not what it was designed for), but any of the frameworks you mention are more than capable. Have you looked at Drupal? I think it hits a sweet spot of allowing you to do a lot without actually programming, but also allowing programmers to customize it heavily through modules. It has a lot of the community and taxonomy features you need -- either built in or available through common modules.
If you're unable to get too deep into a framework like CakePHP, I would say Drupal is your best bet. Drupal is pretty non-coder friendly, but if you're going to make it work for projects that are more complex than out-of-the-box type situations, there's a slight learning curve.
There's at least one module that lets you use a custom Content Type for the user profile, which should allow you to tag profiles (the profile content type nodes) using the taxonomy module. Users in Drupal aren't nodes, so I'm guessing that's why tagging them wasn't working for you.
As for searches, all content should be indexed and searchable in Drupal as long as it's set up to do so. I'm not sure what modules are available for specifically searching by Taxonomy term, but, if you're using a tag system and you want to present haves/wants by tag, that's easy enough to set up with the wonderful Views module. A while ago I think I set up views that mirrored the taxonomy vocab/term structure and just redirected to the view using a Taxonomy Redirect module when someone clicked on a tag.
I think that if you can't make it work in Drupal for some reason (or you really don't like Drupal), you'd have to get into CakePHP or one of the other frameworks out there, but Drupal is definitely able to accomplish what you're aiming to do, probably without any custom PHP coding involved if you got all the right modules together.