Taxonomy - Beyond the Basics...

Peter, I have exactly the same problem and have been trying different approaches to solve it.
BTW, here is my attempt to ask the same question http://drupal.org/node/207877

Regular taxonomy URLs without nice aliases allow you to do whatever you want.
For example: taxonomy/term/1,2 can be mypath/voc-one-term-one/voc-two-term-two, but in reality we can not achieve the second URL that easily.

Here is what I'm thinking.

1. First of all we would have to make all taxonomy terms aliases for all shared vocabularies in the root without hierarchical sub-folders
like this in the path-auto: [cat]
this way each term alias would be a word or a phrase and it will have a unique index if term repeats itself in sub-terms or other vocabularies. So we can be assured that everything in a view's URL between slashes is a single argument and it's unique just like term id.

2. Then adjust theme_links to replace all [href="] to [href="current-vuew-url"] in the $output.
This will make all the terms urls related to the current view url.

3. Edit views' argument handling code to read arguments and make sql request for each of them in the {url_alias} table to extract terms' ids utilizing this code http://drupal.org/node/125629#comment-523242

4. I have no clue what will breadcrumbs say, but depending on the modules we use, we might adjust those too.

This just came to me when I started writing things down on the paper. I already tried all these steps, but separately and they worked. I just need to rewrite them again with the correct unique aliases and that's it. My problem was, that I started using hierarchical aliases like /united-states/new-york/new-york - this is one alias for the city of New York and in the view I will have problem figuring out if it's one argument or three of them. Even if it's 3 of them - argument 'new-york' is repeated twice and it will find the same term id for each of them even though they have different tids. That's why in the item #1 I siggested to go have all aliases in the root, this way I will loose the hierarchy in the URLs, but each alias with be unique - in this example they would be new-york and new-york-0

Hope this helps.

As I described above - I'm using URL aliases since there can not be mistake finding them in the database comparing to the method where you use term names with dashes etc. All aliases are based on [cat-raw] pattern in pathauto.

VIEWS: In the views I have only one argument field Term ID - display all values.

Argument Handling Code:

if($args){
$new_arg = '';
  foreach($args as $arg){
    $result = db_query("SELECT src FROM {url_alias} WHERE dst LIKE '%s'", $arg);

    if (isset($result)) {
      $tid= array();
      while ($nodepath = db_fetch_array($result)) {
        $tid = substr(strrchr($nodepath['src'], "/"), 1);
      }
    }
    $new_arg .= $new_arg == '' ? $tid : ','.$tid;
  }
return array($new_arg);
}

if you print $view array you will see that [args][0] will look like "123,456' and real_url = "view-url/123,456" - where comma works as AND (that's what I need, but if you want to use OR, just change the ',' to '+' in the $new_arg line.

Then in template.php I insterted 2 functions:

//I found this function here in the forums
function detect_views() {
  $allviews = array_flip(views_get_all_urls());
  if ($current = $allviews[arg(0)]) {
      return arg(0);
  } else {
      return FALSE;
  }
}

function view_term_url($url){
  //$term_url = detect_views(). str_replace('/subfolderwheredrupalis', '', url($url)); //if you have drupal installed in a subfolder
  //otherwise
  $term_url = detect_views(). url($url);
  return $term_url;
}

Then we adjust only one line in the theme_links function. Also copy it into your template.php with phptemplate_links name.
See where it says --BEGIN MY CODE-- that's all I added. Basically substituted "/term-alias" with "/view-name/term-alias"

function phptemplate_links($links, $attributes = array('class' => 'links')) {
  $output = '';

  if (count($links) > 0) {
    $output = '<ul'. drupal_attributes($attributes) .'>';

    $num_links = count($links);
    $i = 1;

    foreach ($links as $key => $link) {
      $class = '';

      // Automatically add a class to each link and also to each LI
      if (isset($link['attributes']) && isset($link['attributes']['class'])) {
        $link['attributes']['class'] .= ' ' . $key;
        $class = $key;
      }
      else {
        $link['attributes']['class'] = $key;
        $class = $key;
      }

      // Add first and last classes to the list of links to help out themers.
      $extra_class = '';
      if ($i == 1) {
        $extra_class .= 'first ';
      }
      if ($i == $num_links) {
        $extra_class .= 'last ';
      }
      $output .= '<li class="'. $extra_class . $class .'">';

      // Is the title HTML?
      $html = isset($link['html']) && $link['html'];

      // Initialize fragment and query variables.
      $link['query'] = isset($link['query']) ? $link['query'] : NULL;
      $link['fragment'] = isset($link['fragment']) ? $link['fragment'] : NULL;

      if (isset($link['href'])) {
        //----BEGIN MY CODE-----------------------------
		$link['href'] = view_term_url($link['href']);
	//----END MY CODE-----------------------------
		$output .= l($link['title'], $link['href'], $link['attributes'], $link['query'], $link['fragment'], FALSE, $html);
      }
      else if ($link['title']) {
        //Some links are actually not links, but we wrap these in <span> for adding title and class attributes
        if (!$html) {
          $link['title'] = check_plain($link['title']);
        }
        $output .= '<span'. drupal_attributes($link['attributes']) .'>'. $link['title'] .'</span>';
      }

      $i++;
      $output .= "</li>\n";
    }

    $output .= '</ul>';
  }
  return $output;
}

That's it. Works for me. Every view output terms even from shared vocabularies with paths relevant to the current view.
Good luck!

Hi Nancyw,
Thanks for your post of reassurance as well as your tidbits on your site! Very nice!
Now I thought I share my own trial-error experience as a compleate newbie which may help others just starting with Drupal.
When it came to content and organization of it there are two areas I looked at immediatly. Books and Categories. Initally I ruled out categories/taxonomy thinking of them as "metatags" or "keywords" so I focused on books.
Intuitivly I was after structure of:

Main Category - Category - SubCategory

and how Content Types are laied out I thought that we can use content types in a manner of:
Book - Book Page - Story
Main Category - Category - SubCategory
Real world usage:
Autos
-Trucks
--New

Well I realized that his works but I loose the ability of having each Strict Structure of tag=category and if I wanted "tagging" I would have to resort to 1 taxonomy vocabually with free terms and high hopes that autors/contributor would match them...hmm, it would work if I was the only author.
Next issue I faced was that I don't want my content (main category) to be called "book" but rather somethign else...as in this example "autos"...so I followed the "how to rename a 'book' " only to discover you loose printer-frienly feature and potenatially have issues upgrading down the line. Oh great, another dissappointement.

So, next I looked at the topics and ideas of "use taxonomy to organize..."
On my way I was making a vocabulary with a few terms. This confused me even more then trying to add a content since I have my (or so I thgouth) categorization layed throught book-book page-story and underneath my newly added taxonomy/category fields to match the same. As you can imagine...what a nighmare created by myself. :)

Solution:
Finally,I figured that really when it came to written contet type all I need is pages.
I used taxonomy as follows:
1. Created three vocabularies (or as many as you need) all with the type of "page"
- Main Category
- Category
- SubCategory

2. Started to add terms for each vocabulary:
For "Main Category" added:
Autos
Homes
Trips

For "Category" added:
Sedans
Trucks
Utility
1Bdr
2Bdr
TownHouse
England
USA
Bosnia

Categories above are distinct so there was no issue here but the problem was when terms were "the same" or "shared" and could not distinguish what parent the belong to. This problem was especially noted when creating grandchildren with the same name...and it can happen at any level.
My poor-man solution was to take care of the realtionship in the very last SubCategory.

For "SubCategory" added:
Sedans (essentially re-entered Category)
-New (child of and related to Sedans)
-Used (Chilf of and related to Sedans)

1Bdr (essentially re-entered Category)
-New (child of and related to 1BDr)
-Remodeled (child of and related to 1BDr)

This gave me the dropdown of "SubCategory" that now distincts and differentiates between "New" Autos-Sedans and "New" Houses-1Bdr also allowing for unique Aliases.

Pros: No use of Views or any programming. Visual indicator in dropdown of which parent those child records with The Same/Share Name now belong to.

Cons: A lot of "re-entry" for if you have a lot shared therms. No way of prohibiting users of making selection of
"Main Category"
"Category"
"Category"

At the end we can also add a 4th vocabulary of "Keywords" to allow for some free-tagging for each category to allow users for some keywords of their choice while still imposing the desired/strict Categorizing of Content.

Please keep in mind that I am very new to Drupal and I did not "invent the wheel" but rather struggle how to mount this wheel.I would apprechiate any advice and ideas or potential pitfalls for further development?

Again this was more of a "blog" entry here to show how structure of Drupal can be used or misused by a beginner like me.
Ultimately, I will use Views as I get more experience under my bealt simply beacuse I like "eye candy and design" and word "custom" is what attracted me to Drupal.I hope I did not offend anyone in this thread by posting this and hijacking the post, if soo the admins here can freely delete this entry without any hard feelings on my end.
Thanks for your time!