In this blog post we'll explain how we created advanced sections that act like subdomains, but still belong to the same site. We used Node Hierarchy, Views 2 and a few theming tricks.

The Node Hierarchy module is extremely useful in creating node to node or content type to content type hierarchical structures. In case your site needs to have complex sections with easy navigation, we definitely suggest to use Node Hierarchy, together with the other fantastic module, Menu block. While Node Hierarchy can create menu items on-the-fly, with Menu block module you can create the navigation menus in each section extremely simple.

So, in one of our projects we had to create sections with dynamic designs, which means that each section would have its own look and feel. Instead of going with other modules, we chose the Views + CCK + theming way to achieve this. We created a content type for the "splash" pages that act like section home pages. Then we used an image field for the header image and some custom CSS for each section. The advantage of this is that in the future the client will be able to change the general look of the section by simply uploading a new image.

The tricky part was that the pages under each section had to keep the same design, so we had to use some Views 2 and other tricks to achieve that. We wrote a helper module that would find the top parent of a particular node and use its images and other settings on these pages. The result is a website that has complex sections from a technical point of view, but can be updated and modified extremely simple by the client.