Monday, May 31, 2010

Taxonomy, Vocabularies, Terms, and their uses

When using Taxonomy you are quickly faced with the daunting possibility to "view Taxonomies as you need to"... (in no particular order):
  • Classical categorization; As stated in the Drupal docs, where a single taxonomy corresponds to the animal kingdom classification into groups such as "Mammal", "Fish", "Bird" etc.
  • Used in code-decisions; Use taxonomy and terms to indicated relations between content - For example when presenting a page-view as a collation of nodes (left/right, three-column, multirow... whatever collation). Here you may need a taxonomy named "Page-Position" with the terms ("Left", "Center", "Right" etc.), in order to create a varied but manageable website for your administrators/editors and users.
  • Multiple node-representations at once; Used to view a node in several different contexts on your website. You may for example choose to view a piece of news in a teaser-block on the frontpage, while simultaneously presenting it on a news-archive page in full view-mode (teaser+body+etc.). This is also useful in the case where you selectively want to use nodes in RSS-feeds - Create a taxonomy for RSS, and you're set!
Do note that taxonomies are all capable of being sub-ordinate to other taxonomies, and as such they offer the ability to group content in sub-ordinate relations.
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2 comments:

  1. Søren MaarbjergJune 01, 2010

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Søren MaarbjergJune 01, 2010

    When the issue is "Drupals Taxonomy System", three key words are at stage:
    1) "taxonomy"
    2) "vocabulary"
    3) "term"
    From an admin point of view "using taxonomy" is a matter of
    a) creating/setting vocabularies
    b) creating/setting terms
    This is just for clarification. Information about the concept of taxonomy tends to mix the key words, as in "...taxonomy and terms..."

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