multiple content items on one page

Question

Hope that someone can help me with this question.

I am using the latest version of Drupal 7.

I appreciate that what I am trying to do can in part be achieved with Views, Panels, combinations of the aforementioned or other things like taxonomy and CCK. Perhaps I am not understanding them fully enough to get their full power. However, I am hoping that there is perhaps a module to do what I want to do. As I said, I know I can do some of what I want to do using Views and Panels but I can only figure out how to do what I want to do on a specific 'page' by 'page' basis by using the interface provided in the views and/or panels sections for each specific page. What I am want is a more dynamic way of creating a view without having to go through the process of creating a view each time.

I know that nodes are not traditionally used as I want them to be. However, I want to be able to give an admin user the ability to place multiple content types (multiple nodes) on the same 'page' without having to design their own view and/or panel set up for each 'page'. For example on one page they may want to put a content type called Article, then beneath that article they want to put a Video, under that a basic page, then an Image, then an image with a text wrapped around it and then another specific article and so on. There could be any combination of the content types (nodes) on each page and any number of pages.

I appreciate that generally speaking a "basic" node is generally considered or rendered as an individual "page" or grouped together in some way to display as a blog BUT I want to give an admin user the ability to dynamically combine any node not just the type with an easy to use interface. Even it is just drop down menus of the different content types. I also want to give them the ability to move these up and down the page preferably using drag & drop or at least a text box to put in the weight of each item.

I have found the command "node_view" and can sort of see a way of using that but I wouldn't know how to use it in a dynamic way or how to set it up for use on user created "pages". I am fairly new to Drupal and I maybe barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps there is already a module out there that I haven't found.

Thanks in advance for any help...

Answer 1

we had a similar requirement for a site we built recently. In this case we ended up creating a content type representing a "page" with entity reference fields used to pull in the other content to be displayed.

We also used the Entity Connect to make the users' lives a bit easier by providing the ability to add new content from within the page edit form.

So just to clarify, there's one content type you might call a "page" or "container", and several other content types used to comprise its contents. Each entity reference field was laid out in a different area of the page when displayed, and could have multiple values.

Answer 2

I would recommend to take a look at the Context module. It's probably one possible way to achieve what you want.

Context allows you to manage contextual conditions and reactions for different portions of your site. You can think of each context as representing a "section" of your site. For each context, you can choose the conditions that trigger this context to be active and choose different aspects of Drupal that should react to this active context.

Think of conditions as a set of rules that are checked during page load to see what context is active. Any reactions that are associated with active contexts are then fired.

A context can be a path to a specific node for example. Or when a view is viewed. This can trigger reactions like putting a block into a region or display a view in another region or at a specific position in a region.

This can be managed through a UI with drag an drop.

Once you get familiar with the concept, you'll love it... ;)