Over the past few weeks I took a look at several modules that deal with relating nodes and links to other nodes within the Drupal system. Last week at Drupal Con AMS 2005 Ber Kessels presented on relations systems in Drupal. Defining relations within content can serve as an important supplementary navigation system, particularly on websites where users do not rely on a main navigation system to find content.

For example, take a site like Yahoo! News. If I go to Yahoo! News on a daily basis I first check the headlines. If I find an important article
to read and follow the link to read the article, on the article's page I am given several choices at the bottom of the page. Often, the choices include to select to read other articles based on the same topic as the story I just read, to see related photos, to read related opinion articles, or to read stories that fall under the same topic as the story I read. I may initially use the main navigation system to go and read top articles in the business section, and  once I find the article that interests me and I read it, I can use the website's relations system to read other content related to my attraction.

There are both automated as well as manual ways to make relations within content on a website. Search-like engines can index content and decide what an articles focus is, giving the title heavier weight, the summary a little less weight, and the body of the article normal weight. Alternatively or additionally, upon publishing the content or entering it into the publish queue, the author or editor can tag the content based on set terms or free terms that they feel pinpoint the article's subject. Finally, a combination of these methods can be used to give each article a suplementary navigation system whereby the content's related content pieces are listed somewhere in the page the content itself is published.

Relations can also help administrators and editors site other content or actually use related content within articles they write on a site. For example, a site administrator's photo gallery can list below each photo what articles relate to the photo on the site, or vice versa. This can help the editor and administrator in many ways, and makes content less lost in a content management system where there are no systems to manage relations. Content management is more than just knowing what is published and what is not. My following article will
discuss the modules I tested to explain what role they play in making relations on a Drupal site.