Kiosk - The Resurrection

The thing about Drupal is there's always more than one way to accomplish your goals, and usually the most elegant solution is not the one you originally implement. As I mentioned before, I put my documentation on the Libraries Drupal Group. Luckily I got some responses from some real Drupal experts advising me on how to create one View for all my categories. While I had to re-do my work, I'm glad to have this information for future use on the redesign. So, documenting madwoman that I am, I've revised the documentation for this process:

1. Create the categories and subcategories in Taxonomy
2. Create a Content Type in CCK and attach the Taxonomy to it. Use the Link module to add a link field to the Content Type.
3. Populate the Content Type with web links.
4. Create a View, Field = Content:URL; Filter = Published True; Sort criteria: Content:link title:URL asc; Argument: Taxonomy:Term ID (Title=%1; Validator=Taxonomy Term; Vocabulary=Tourist Information).
5. Create a Page Display in the View. Path is "tourist_information/%"
6. You can preview the View using the Taxonomy ID (TID) for each term in the specified Vocabulary.
7. Create a second View for the subcategories. Criteria is the same, except no Argument. Instead, create a separate Block display for each subcategory and add a Filter = Taxonomy Term for each specific subcategory.
8. Create a Menu called Tourist Information. Populate it with the View paths.
7. Create a main page called Tourist Information.
8. Assign the Tourist Information menu to the content region of the Tourist Information main page in Blocks.
9. Assign the subcategory blocks created in Views to the content region of their corresponding View paths in Blocks.
10. If you want the Tourist Information menu to show up as Navigation element anywhere, use the Multiblock module to create a separate instance of the Tourist Information block. Then assign that instance to your chosen region in Blocks.
11. Now if you navigate to the Tourist Information main page you should see a list of the categories and subcategories (Tourist Information menu in the content region). If you click on any link, you should go to a page created with the corresponding View path.

Clear as mud?

The Kiosk project is finished. Let this be my last post on it!

Kiosk - The Return

I submitted the process I used to create the Tourist Information page to the Libraries Drupal Group. Another user was trying to accomplish something similar. The process I listed is a little different from what I posted in my previous entry. I also solicited suggestions on how to streamline the process. We'll see what people think:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/16076

Kiosk Progress

Well, after much experimentation the following solution seems to work for our Tourist Information web links list:

1. Create the categories and subcategories in Taxonomy
2. Create a Content Type in CCK and attach the Taxonomy to it. Use the Link module to add a link field to the Content Type.
3. Populate the Content Type with web links.
4. Create a Menu called Tourist Information.
5. Create a View for each category and add Page displays for the category and its corresponding subcategories and Block displays for each subcategory as well. Assign the Page displays to the Tourist Information menu.
6. Create a page for each category that contains subcategories. Assign the pages to the Tourist Information menu.
7. Create a main page called Tourist Information.
8. Assign the Tourist Information menu to the content region of the Tourist Information main page in Blocks.
9. Assign the subcategory blocks created in Views to the content region of each category page in Blocks.
10. If you want the Tourist Information menu to show up as Nav Bar anywhere, use the Multiblock module to create a separate instance of the Tourist Information block.
11. Now if you navigate to the Tourist Information main page you should have a list of the categories and subcategories (Tourist Information menu in the content region). If you click on any link, you should see either a page created in Views, or a page assigned with the blocks created in Views.

Simple, right? Not.

Our next challenge is to get the Kiosk theme to be one thing on the home page and something else on all sub-pages.

Wish us luck!

PPLD Kiosk

Well, we've started work on our first official PPLD Drupal website. It's actually a kiosk that will be situated downtown at the Penrose Library.

The big challenge here is creating a View from a Content Type that will list out our Tourist Information websites by category. This is easy to do in SQL/VBScript. Hopefully it will be easy to do in Drupal once we get the hang of it.

Stay tuned...

Home Page Design Guidelines

As we begin to move into the construction phase of PPLD.org's redesign, I've been keeping an eye out for interesting articles, especially about usability.

Here is an article by Jakob Neilson, Top Ten Guidelines for Home Page Usability.

We will definitely be referencing this article during our home page construction.

PPLD.org Website Improvement Survey Results

Thanks to the participation of PPLD's wonderful patrons, our Website Improvement Survey was a big success! We had 192 participants and received lots of feedback that will go toward making the redesigned website a more user-friendly experience.

We analyzed the results and now have a Site Map constructed to serve as a starting point for the website population. Next up, converting our proprietary database authentication to EZProxy, and when the local server is ready, begining the redesign construction and population.

Thank you to everyone who participated!

I Take It Back...

While Drupal development work is happening on vfranklyn.com, I have decided to continue my documentation of the actual ppld.org redesign process here on VirgiBlog. Sorry for the confusion...