Node/website architecture visualization

Question

I am seeking to build a website which contains quite a lot of information. All this information will be structured in a specific way. As such I am looking for a way to represent this data/articles/nodes visually.

The purpose is to be able to add new articles to an already existing visual structure by simply adding a node and classifying it/linking to existing articles that are already structured/adding taxonomy terms etc.

The visual structure will as such have a changing shape/size. A map of the information presented on the site if you will.

A way to navigate the wealth of information visually.

Does something like this already exist or is there a way to create such a module/program for the site - potentially as a separate site that presents the drupal site?

Thanks,

Answer 1

I don't believe there is a Drupal specific option, but you can utilize a module like XML Sitemap:

The XML sitemap module creates a sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl a website and keep their results up to date. The sitemap created by the module can be automatically submitted to Ask, Google, Bing (formerly Windows Live Search), and Yahoo! search engines. The module also comes with several submodules that can add sitemap links for content, menu items, taxonomy terms, and user profiles.

and then use a number of third party online or software based options for visualising xml data. A quick search in google yielded a number of options for 'visualise sitemap'

Answer 2

In addition to Geoff's answer (which is an stroke of genius), note that you can link nodes using Entity Reference, and create heirarchies of nodes using Node Hierarchy.

I recommend the former unless you really need to specify which node is parent and which is child, in which case the latter works pretty well.

Answer 3

There is also the often forgotten book module which is part of Drupal core. It allows for nesting of nodes inside other nodes so you can create a book with chapters. (the guide pages on Drupal.org are an example of this.) depending on the stucture you need this could be useful.