How to organize content in Orchard?

Question

One of my colleague left on vacation and left me with an Orchard project to work on. I never worked with Orchard, so please excuse my ignorance and my possibly stupid questions.

I come to you for general advice on how to implement and structure the content of my site, as my research didn't give me the answers I'm looking for.

Here are the requirements:

• The site must be divided into sections (section A, section A-1, section A-2, section B, etc...)
• The navigation of the site must be based on the sections, each navigation item must also contain an image
• Each section has a separate page with roughly 4 types of content that must be displayed:
  • Title of the page
  • Articles associated with this section, which represent the main content
  • FAQ content associated with the section which should be displayed in a specific zone
  • Miscellaneous content associated with the section which should also be displayed in a specific zone

I'm struggling at nearly every aspect of the requirements...

We started building a taxonomy, with as many terms as we have sections, allowing us to build the hierarchy we want, which is perfect. But this had 2 downsides:

• The built-in taxonomy-based navigation is static, so the only thing displayed is the term, and we couldn't find a way to change it so the user would be able to add an image to the taxonomy term.
• The generated pages based on the taxonomy display every content item based on the current term, that is, the articles, but also the FAQ content and the miscellaneous content, all in the Content zone.

Is there any way to work around these issues by using the built-in taxonomy? Or will I have to build content types from scratch in order to achieve what I'm trying?

The solution my colleague came up with was to add a layer for each section, and add in this layer 3 widgets, one for each specific content (title, FAQ, misc) in different zones. But I don't think this will me maintainable, as we currently have 4 main sections, each with 4-5 subsections, so that's rougly 60 layers, which will be a nightmare for the client to maintain.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated, I'm kind of lost.

Thanks in advance,

Mickaël

Answer 1

Taxonomies was a good start, but now you need to study projections. You'll be able to set-up filters about what you display. For adding an image to your terms, one way to do it is to add a media library picker field to the type that was created for your taxonomy.