Greetings! We are in the process of redesigning our website and we are looking for a specific functionality to be able to easily and quickly search for our resources (i.e. transcriptions, .mp3 audio files, news letters.)

We really like the way that www.desiringgod.org has implemented this. If you wouldn't mind taking a look at this site and letting me know if DotNetNuke has any modules that could do something close to this, I would greatly appreciate it.

To help you check it out quickly, I will help you get to exactly what I would like for you to take a look at. When you go to www.desiringgod.org, click on the Resource Library Tab in the nav menu. Once you are on the Resource Library page, in the right hand column, there is a section titled "Browsing Tools". If you click through those links and see how they work, that is what we are trying to attempt.

Any suggestions you could give would be extremley helpful as we would like for our site to go live as soon as possible and until this functionality gets in place, we are delaying progress.

Many Thanks,
David

The first question would be: do you have the "metadata" for all of the files somewhere? So, if you have myfile.pdf, where is the data that tells you author, category, date, etc? You will need this data to be able to generate the indexes which are then linked to specific files.

There are a number of ways that you can display the indexes similarly to the site you mention, but only if you have the data to first generate them.

Joe,

Thank you so much for your reply.

To be quite honest with you I have never created metadata before. So my first guess would be we don't have metadata for the transcriptions. We have just always pasted the transcription into an html file and created a link to the transcribed html file.

However, I am not opposed to creating this metadata if you can point me in the right direction as to how to get started doing this. If there is some documentation on how to do this I would love to try it. Thanks in advance so much for your help.

David

This can get complicated very quickly, and "doing it right" is the key to success.

That said, the basic elements would include:
-Title
-Date
-Author
-Category
-Filename
- Keywords

Complications arise if you can have multiple authors, multiple categories, etc.

In the simplest format, you would put all of this into a table and then you can construct your indices by doing different searches on the table. You'll use something to convert the search results to HTML (with links) and format the results with CSS.

You might be able to use the Reports module, the Form & List module, or Tressleworks.ca's SGSV module.

You might actually be able to use something like Ventrian's Property Manager module, where each "property" would be a file to be indexed. That module includes fields that might pass for some of the metadata fields, and I think you can create custom fields where you need them.

Well, at least that's a starting point.