Preventing URL access to the taxonomy?

Basically what I would like to do is to turn a vocabulary into an internal category index and make sure that the automatic term pages are not possible to reach from outside Drupal. That includes that it should not be possible to use the system path in a browser to reach them, not that applications such as Pathauto should be able to generate human readable URL's for such a term.

Ideally this control should be possible to define on:

• Vocabulary - All terms in the vocabulary
• Term level - Every sub term for the term
• Term - An individual term

Take the way WA uses the taxonomy to create the editorial hierarchy and the names used there. I can imagine that in most cases those term names are pretty useless as pages on the site, but they will still be there. I suppose they can be blocked in .htaccess, but I would rather have a UI setting so that I get informed about the status when working with terms in that vocabulary.

With the features in the list above, I would be able to create a structure where the top level terms are both available as list pages and for WA, but then each top level can have a sub level for editorial control which does not have automatic list pages, while other sub levels does.

I can also imagine many other cases where it would be great to be able to use the taxonomy categorisation internally and by Views for example, but they would make little sense also being available publicly as browsable list pages.

I have been looking for such a module for Drupal, but closes thing I found for D6 was Taxonomy Hide, however it only prevented the view of the taxonomy on content pages, not preventing access to the list pages for the terms.

As I said in the OP such a function would probably be best to have as a stand alone module, but with an API so it can be easily be used and/or controlled by other modules.

Not really thought of that it might be useful for some users/roles to be able to view the list page. My intention is to be able to prevent that terms that are merely used for internal site structure is not accessible from anywhere else than Drupal code. If there would be a need to see such a page, then using Views would make that possible.

I know that Taxonomy isn't really supposed to be used for this kind of thing, but since so many modules use it for what it is not really designed for, this kind of feature would give the site owner control over the how these vocabularies and terms are accessible.

It would be great if you could make this into a separate module so it can easily be used for any vocabulary as well by other modules.

An easy way of summarising this would be to call it being able to make taxonomy vocabularies and terms public or private. Public ones work as today, while private are not exposed outside the scope of Drupal.

@agentrickard Until there is another module with an API you can integrate this with, please add the patch to hide the taxonomy. I like the idea to have a permission for it as well so it is possible to give certain roles access to it.

Thanks for the enlightenment about how the taxonomy module works. I'm no coder, but that was good information to know when I stumble on a module that doesn't use it properly.

Great, thanks Ken. Will test as soon as you have a full patch/dev version ready.

Perfect. On my way out now, but will test when I am back later on tonight.

@agentrickard: Have applied the patch and access to the terms are now blocked in my test installation. Brilliant work.

Nice one, will give it a test run tomorrow.