Content appearing under specific tabs

Question

My site will be divided into multiple areas, or tabs, for example, Music, Politics, News, etc. Under each tab I'd like to display a different sidebar (my sidebar will contain menus representing categories, for example, in the Music tab, the sidebar should show Rock, Classical, Jazz, but in the News tab it should show National, International, Sport, etc). I'm hoping that all my content could be of the same content type, but that they exist under one tab or another.

How should I set this up? So far I have tried similar content types, one for each tab, and a theme for that type which shows the appropriate sidebar. But it'd be nicer to use just the one content type overall, with a field indicating which tab it belongs to. Is that possible?

Answer 1

A multi-level taxonomy could accomplish this for you. Something like:

• Music
  • Rock
  • Classical
  • Jazz
• Politics
• News
  • National
  • International
  • Sport

Create this, and then add a field for it on your single content type. Then use the Taxonomy Menu module to create a menu from your taxonomy, and the Menu Block module to place both a top level navigation, and the sidebar navigation. You can adjust what level the menu starts at for this.

Your taxonomy menu will link to each taxonomy term listing page, which is a default view. Further, if you setup URL aliases for your taxonomy, and then rebuild links, each page will have a meaningful URL (home/news/international). You can take it a step further by adding URL aliases for your content type as well, and use the taxonomy term path in that so you end up with (home/news/international/title-of-article).