The basic workflow of my Drupal site is this:
- User submits article via the Drupal website
- site admin approves the article AND needs to associate this article to an upcoming review meeting for committee members
- Review committee meeting happens and all articles associated with the meeting date is displayed and visible to the reviewing committee members to review.
- Review committee can only leave ONE comment, while site admin can reply to their comments infinite times.
- Review committee then votes to approve/not approve the article
- If approved, site admin publishes the article and it is displayed to the public internet.
So far I am doing everything by creating my custom modules and custom forms via the Drupal API, and it’s coming along fine. For example, I am writing my own comment features, keywords feature, voting feature, etc… But now my concerns are that I am not leveraging Drupal abilities such as taxonomy, search, keywords, etc… In addition, I see that there are existing modules that can do some of the stuff I am creating. Am I doing this wrong and reinventing the wheel? I am more PHP savvy so I am going with what I am familiar with.
Basically I went with creating a new node type. The reason, I figured, is that I would be able to leverage Drupal’s mechanisms of referencing nodes. If I just create forms and store them independently in tables, then it kind of defeats the purpose.
Also, I dropped Drupal 6 and went with Drupal 7.