Using Drupal as a Social Oriented Content Platform - Part 2

Learning Technologies is researching the web based content management system called Drupal.  We are looking to use Drupal as a hub for a collaborative website featuring forums, wikis, static content and a library. This story is a continuation of a previous story. 

One of the details we were going to research further into was the use of breadcrumbs in the wiki.  Breadcrumbs would allow for navigation of Drupal wiki pages in an intuitive manner.  After doing some research, I found that Drupal has this ability built into it in the form of the Book module.

Using the Drupal Book Module

The book module allows you to create a hierarchy to pages (specifically for this project for book/wiki pages) that you can navigate.  This hierarchy can be displayed in breadcrumbs and also in a menu, making it very powerful in the Drupal setting.

To use the book module, enable the book module in the Drupal Modules Administration area.  This will give your administrator account access to the book features. The Drupal website has plenty of information on using the book module.

There is a book navigation block that you'll want to enable.  Breadcrumbs come automatically with the hierarchy of the pages.  Another thing that comes automatically with the book module is a navigation feature at the bottom of every page.  This navigation feature lists sub-pages, and previous and following pages.  This functionality is better suited to a book approach rather than a wiki, so we'll look at how to disable the book navigation feature.

The book module, though very helpful, is a bit more cumbersome than your standard wiki (which was designed for the purpose of automatically creating a hierarchy).  To setup the structure for the book module, it will be necessary to manually setup the tree structure by arranging the pages into a set order/tree. 

Removing book module book style navigation

Here is an excerpt from creating a theme override for a module discussion:

1. Go into the book module directory drupal/modules/book
2. Copy the file book-navigation.tpl.php into your theme directory (your theme should be something like sites/all/themes/theme_name/
3. Edit the new book-navigation.tpl.php and remove the part that says <?php print $tree; ?>
4. Because of the new theme registry, this change won't be visible immediately, so you must visit example.com/admin/settings/performance and go to the bottom of the page where you click the button for "Clear cached data"
5. Should be done :)

Using the above steps, you can remove the Book module navigation area from your current theme.

Results

The book module solves the issue of a breadcrumb ability in the wiki, with the added distinction of enabling a Drupal menu.  The process of setting the structure is more tedious than a wiki platform, but is something that can be done properly with a modicum of work.  The ability to remove the Book style navigation from the theme templates makes the appearance of a Drupal wiki setup conform to a seemingly intuitive standard of wiki navigation (rather than a book/documentation based approach).