Drupal 7 – Creating and Feeding Complex Content Types
It is no secret that one of the most important aspects of a website is its content – now more than ever. As websites become more complex, the information within often becomes increasingly complex to author and manage. While content management systems like Drupal have strong content authoring abilities out of the box, it’s easy to neglect this aspect of a site, thus creating an uphill struggle for administrative users that are less familiar with the system.
field collections is a simple, easy to implement module that we frequently use to enhance and streamline the content editing process. When the website enters in production another module like Field groups is very important to make authors update more confortable. At the end of this post, I will explain shortly the aim of that plugin.
Once the complex content modelling is complete we often need to migrate old data company or feeds with data the new drupal site
For all of that, you will need all the main modules below to install including the Entity and Ctools modules :
Once Feeds activated in Drupal this allow you to configure a Processor a Parser :
Multiple related content fields using field collection
Another example of complex content types using Tags / Fields collections / text zones …
Sample configuration feed csv import into field collection:
How to feed a complex collection Field with csv import (unicode format):
Remember for double quotes you must replace them : every ” with “”” in order to make feed import working.
Feeds Tamper is very important to manage multivalued field import, it works with feeds import module :
A sample of confiuration csv table like this format : isn;value1|value2|value3. You must add a plugin with tamper on second zone that explode values around | ….
Sample Mapping feed import for a zone Tag or Term reference type in Drupal :
A visual basic program on Access 2010 for preparing files for multivalued fields import in drupal …
XML Feeds works with xml files nodes , it works with feeds import module :
A sample of confiuration for this format importer :
Improving the out-of-the-box editing experience
The drupal plugin Field groups is used to group fields together in a variety of ways during the editing process. By default, Drupal simply spits out any and all fields onto the content editing page in the order specified within the content type.
Example of using field groups to group content fields together.