Take THAT, Drupal!

Damn. I just had a helluva time setting up the projects section.

The site is meant to be arranged so that there's three major elements:

1. the blog,
2. the method of feedback (forums in this case), and
3. the projects section.

First, I tried putting all projects into a projects sub-menu, which I would then link to in the primary links menu along the top. Only problem? The menus don't actually have any page to link to that just show their items, so that was out of the question.

Then came experimentation with the categories module for Drupal. What a miserable exercise in failure that was. Apparently, it's meant to sit conceptually somewhere between the book module and the taxonomy module; semi-structured data. I installed it before knowing this. To say that I "un-installed" it would be riding on a lot of faith, because it wouldn't remove itself via the modules interface. After unwiring it from the forum and taxonomy modules, I ended up deleting the directory entirely. There are a few fragments left here and there, but I've swept the cruft under the rug. Let's hope that doesn't cause too many problems.

Finally, I discovered the views module from a random Drupal forums post that suggested it for another problem. Got my hands on it: exactly what I was looking for. It's as complicated as all hell, but cloning one of the existing views and tweaking values works really well.

End result? A completely working Projects section! All I had to do was add the project content type, and tie the view to that node type. Presto! Great success!