Question

I have a site where students can post their own content on it. Whenever they create content they are asked to type in their School Name. Since there will be multiple students from the same school I want to combine all of the duplicate values for the School Name field. I also want to link each School Name so it displays content from only the selected School. Is this possible? If so, how?

Answer 1

you really should consider using the school_name variable for a taxonomy vocabulary (http://drupal.org/node/23405), this way, the field wont be a duplicate, because it references the same term in the vocabulary.

then, when creating the content-type (or user) fields, use the ‘relation to taxonomy’ field option.

since it seems like you do not know all possible schools, use the tag widget.

in any case, you should think about deduplication, since this builtin method is not considering misspellings or different spellings of the same school name. (although the tag field has a autocomplete function).

a better approach is to present the user with all possible schools, however, that means you need to know all possible schools..

[EDIT] this, of course, is suggesting you are using drupal7 (or later). if not, use cck instead.