Will’s Similiblog

I wanted to include a place for users to upload/archive files (of all sorts), to serve as a simple ‘user portfolio’ section of the site. I played around a bunch with some of the file management modules for Drupal, and the site was getting more & more complicated; and I finally came around to the “keep it simple” mantra that I’m trying to use to dictate the rest of the site’s design.

Fortunately, the Views module came to my rescue again, here coupled in use with Drupal’s built-in taxonomy. I came back to the idea of providing users with a single entry type - blog posts (allowing attachments); and use Views and Taxonomy to provide ways of viewing and organizing blog-post attachments.

Below, are the Views settings for a “my public files” page:

filters:

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I created an “exposed filter”, to permit the user to select their attached files by tag:

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and created a page layout in table form:

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This view collects all files that the user has submitted as attachments to blog posts, into a table on a single page; renders these sortable by name, upload date, tag; and searchable by tag.

The Views module will permit many different ways of viewing the collected files - e.g., views could be created for “my published files,” “my unpublished/private files,” “all users’ files,” “my buddies’ files,” &c.; and could include exposed filters to further parse display.

I’m quite happy with how all this worked out - it feels like a very organic solution from the users’ end. Rather than creating a dedicated file upload/archiving corner of the site, files are contributed through the blogging interface (as either public or private/unpublished blog posts); and are merely displayed and organized through this interface.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 9:11 am and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.