Organizing a Department based site in Drupal

Question

I'd like to migrate a large set of static pages to a Drupal site.

The first problem I'm coming up against is that most content is structured under a department.

A department page would have a list of most content in the center and then up to 3 sidebars, with the department info, additional links and maybe one more sidebar with some random links in it.

How could this be achieved and make it user friendly to maintain?

I'd also like to have special blocks tied to specific nodes, which I've found a module for.

I'm also looking at crawling the site and putting that into Drupal, which is a whole other topic.

Answer 1

The simplest approach is to use the built-in taxonomy module to associate content with a department (a taxonomy term). If there are only few departments, you will not even need a module like taxonomy_menu to give you menu entries for the taxonomy terms.

But, depending on your requirements, there are other options:

• If you have an order on your content that editors should maintain manually rather than it being maintained based on timestamps, the book module allows that.

• If members of a department have special rights on their content, one organic group (module organic groups) per department would be a natural choice.

• If you need further separation, eg. separate user spaces or completely separate content or upload areas, check out the multi-site setup (handbook).

Good luck.