Content Strategy: Similar but unique content

Question

I am building a Drupal 7 site and need some help with my content strategy. One type of content I regularly work with are workshop/conference pages. Each workshop/conference may have one or more of the following (proposed content type in parens)

• The workshop/conference (book page)
  • About (basic page)
  • Registration (webform)
  • Schedule (basic page)
  • Lodging information (basic page)
  • Transportation information (basic page)

The main benefit of this approach: we'll use a Book Navigation Block to have a menu for each workshop/conference sub-page.

However, I see several disadvantages:

• Two different workshops/conferences may require unique "Lodging Information" pages. Drupal won't let me title two different pages "Lodging Information" even though each belongs to a separate book. I could name each specifically, like
  • "Lodging Information Conference FOO 2013"
  • "Lodging Information Conference BAR 2013"
  • "Lodging information Conference BAZ 2013"
• Thinking long-term. . . Let's say in the future our site documents dozens/hundreds of workshops/conferences. The drop-down to select Book parent pages could get excessively long. If we don't stick with a good naming convention, this could be a bit overwhelming for content contributors.
• I don't like the Book navigation helpers near the footer of every parent/child page (table of contents on parent, previous/up/next buttons on all children pages). Editing the core Book module seems like overkill to remove this functionality. Perhaps there's a better way?

Using the Book Module brings up more questions than answers. Is a the Book Module the best approach to implementing a workshop/conference page?

Answer 1

I would agree with beth's post earlier, use a taxonomy to group all the different content types you are working with. For example, create a taxonomy vocabulary named "Conference". For EACH of the content types used to store information about the conference, add a field: Label: Conference Type: Term reference Form element to edit the data: Autocomplete term widget (tagging)

Now, when you are filling in the details using your different content types, tag your content with the conference name. Later you can filter display of that information by filtering on the taxonomy term.