Article

Drupal is exceptionally good at creating exactly the right data model for your content. As you begin modeling your content, you should also think about how you will retrieve and display, or list, the content on your site.

This article explores five ways you can list content on your site once it has been created.

1. Curated lists of content: Menus
2. Categorization of content: Vocabularies and taxonomies
3. Discretionary lists of related content: Views
4. Wayfinders for people: Breadcrumbs
5. Content maps for search engines: Sitemaps

The experts will already see some flaws with my categories: you can use Draggable views and Nodequeue to manually curate Views, and you can use Menu block to improve the wayfinding experience. Let's stick with the broad strokes for now though.

Curated Lists with Menus

Menus allow you to manually curate a list of content which exists on your site, almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure of links (See Figure A).

Menus are typically used for areas of static navigation. For example, the primary menu of your site, a set of utility links (log in, log out, my account), or the legal section (ToS, privacy policy).

Once a menu has been created, it becomes available as a block, which you can place into any region of your site (See Figure B).

To extend the usability of the core Menu module, you may want to use one of the following contributed modules: Menu block; DHTML menu, Superfish, or Nice menus; Menu position; and Navigation 404.