Drupal: Content in blocks from node_reference fields?

Question

After only a few weeks of working with Drupal I've come up with a recurring problem, which I don't really have an optimal solution to, so I'm hoping that someone here might be able to give some best practice pointers.

What I have is a region inside my node.tpl.php, which is populated with blocks that display content from two different CCK fields of the type node_reference. This works fine when displaying a single node. The problem appears when I need to use a view.

For example, lets say I have a news listing, and a single news item view. When I display the single news item I can use the news node node_reference field to reference whatever material I would like to have in my sidebar, but when on the news listing view I would like to reference nodes separately. What would be the best practice to solve this?

I'm having a few ideas, but none seem like the logical choice, how would you do?

Answer 1

My understanding of your problem is that you don't want the blocks to display on the view page and you want the block information displayed inline with the node.

The first part is easy, you can modify the block visibility settings to not show up on the path where you have the view.

The second part will depend on how you set up your view. If you are using fields you can simply add fields for the node_reference and they should display. If you are using a node view, you will have to override the template and create a template which displays the node reference field.

If you want further explanation please comment and I can clarify

Answer 2

I tend to want to create my own modules, which create blocks and reference the database directly. Then I put the blocks inside of panels, this seems to be more flexible for me than using views and cck fields etc ...

Answer 3

After reading my question I realize that it was explained pretty badly, so I'll try again, and also tell how I solved it.

The Problem
On normal "pages" (when displaying only a single node), I have a sidebar that shows something similar to banners, which are either random, or I can select one or many that should always be displayed on the sidebar. This is solved easily when displaying a single node, using a CCK node_reference field. The problem is when using a View that displays multiple nodes, for example a news listing-

The Solution
In my case I could solve this by creating additional fields on my default Page content-type. These fields were called view, display and arguments. In my tpl.php I then embedded the news listing view inside a page, lets call it News. This way I gained great flexibility, and also helps the News page to know where it is located in menu structure.

Final comments
I have yet to discover if there are any drawbacks or dangers in doing this way, but if there are, feel free to share them with me :)