List pages on frontpage with views?

Question

So, I'm relatively new to Drupal, and I'd like to make a Drupal site with a front page with a grid of links to other commonly used pages on the site. This site is intended as a sort of community page for a small town, so it would be links like Government, News, Business Directory, History, Forum, etc.

Some of these pages are basic pages on my Drupal site, some are external links, and some are links to views or modules, like the aggregator module. I'd like all of the links to be sortable and generally have the same markup. I'd also like these links to be gathered automatically, i.e. via the 'Promote to Front Page' option or something like that. I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT want to hardcode this to a basic page.

So far my solution has been to create a view with a list of title fields from pages promoted to the front page, and a special content type I named 'Link' which are actually just redirects to external urls. The problem now is that I don't know how to include special pages, like aggregator or view.

Any ideas? Is there a better way to do this? Have I missed something?

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, these are the steps I would take.

1. Create a Link content type
2. Download the Link module which will allow you to paste in internal or external URL's and store them in a CCK field.
3. Add a link field to the Link content type
4. Create a view that brings in all of the Link content types and displays them on the home page i.e (Title, Body, Link).
5. Sorting would only be possible (without custom code) if you used a table as your display type.

Answer 2

you will have to add a new display type in your views "PAGE" and give it a path so you can goto that page directly.