How to organize product catalog site in Drupal 6?

Question

Hello there, please advice me how to organize product catalog site with such structure (this is pages which should be in site map):

- Home page
- About Us
-- Team
-- Contacts
- Products
-- Category
--- Product
---- Overview
---- Photo gallery
---- Variants
-- Category
--- Subcategory
--- Product
---- Overview
---- Photo gallery
---- Variants

I know that i can use Page nodes for general pages like About page. And i can prepare Product node with CCK with needed fields. Then i can use taxonomy vocabulary for product categories/subcategories. Is this a right way to do such functionality? Or better to use just child/parent nodes?

And how i can show subpages menu on product page? How i can organize menus? I need one menu with primary links, second menu below it, for secondary links (except Products catalog) and sidebar menu for Products catalog.

Please advice. May be this is easy questions, but i just learning Drupal (but i have experience with other CMS).

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

You're going to find that there are several ways to set up a site in Drupal, and since you're currently learning Drupal, whatever method you pick now, will probably not be how the final site is delivered. Drupal has a challenging learning curve, and the first few hundred hours are the toughest.

Best thing to do is to set up a local server and create a test site or two (or three...).

Get accustomed to the basic node types and how taxonomy would help you with them. Then enable the core Book module and notice how it makes hierarchical pages easier in some respects. Get familiar with the way that the primary and secondary menus work, and how you can populate them in different ways.

Create some additional content types and then add CCK fields to them, and then use the Views module to display them. These two modules are part of almost every sophisticated Drupal site--learning how to use them together will benefit you greatly.

Then take a look at the many contributed modules that exist for categorizing content, as well as shopping cart solutions if you'll be selling directly from this catalog.

Spend some time searching both the Drupal site and external sites for people's experiences with setting up catalogs--you'll find even more ways to accomplish this.

Good luck!