Sunday, April 27, 2008

Creating website sections with Drupal

I am considering using Drupal for a website, and I am wondering whether Drupal makes it possible to separate a website into sections, with different looks/content for all webpages/nodes in a section. Also, if it is possible, how much know-how of Drupal/PHP would be required. Let me explain...

By sections, I mean a group of pages that includes distinct navigational elements, content, or graphic banners from other groups of pages. (I realize "sections" may not be the right terminology here, but I haven't been able to figure out what is so far.) As a sort of stupid illustrative example, for a website called Pets, there might be sections for Dogs, Cats, Fish, Birds, and on and on. All webpages in the Dogs section (perhaps hundres of pages) would have: (a) the same graphic banner with a dog, (b) blocks of copy or links related to dogs. The same for the Cats section, etc.

In practice, I would want this to work as follows: Whenever I created a new webpage (node, I guess, in Drupal terminology), I would be able to decide what section it belonged to (maybe from a pull-down menu listing the "sections"), and the correct look/content would be applied automatically.

What module(s) would be most appropriate for doing this?

Thanks so much for any tips/guidance!