By pun461 on

Hey guys, having a bit of a problem with categories. I've no idea what to select as vocabulary, content types or terms - it seems like there could be several different ways that I could set up my content and I cant figure out which is the right one.

Basically the site I'm making has a bunch of primary links at the top of the screen, theres about 12 of them. Each of those links is a certain subject ie. parks & gardens, development assessment, roads & transport.

For each of these links there needs to be 4 different content types, 1 - List (the initial list of questions that comes up after a primary link is selected) 2 - Question (the secondary group of subquestions once an item in the list is selected) 3 - answer (an answer to the selected question) 4 - procedure (a procedure to use if specified in the answer).

Im wondering what the best way of setting this up would be as it seems I could do either one of these things

Set a vocabulary for each site subject, then add answer/question/list/procedure to the terms OR add content to each vocabulary as a term and have question/answer/list/procedure as content types.

I could also add a vocabulary for question/answer/list/procedure and have all subjects as terms?

What is the best way to organise this content?

Thanks a bunch!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

4cornersusa.com’s picture

4cornersusa.com commented

Let me quote David Mercer here; "...you will find that the method of categorizing content in Drupal makes it one of the most sophisticated content management systems around---no kidding!" Translation: NOT EASY.

I have read and read and Googled/Wiki and read some more Then surfed and studied different category structures and terminology relationships Then read some more. Now I am almost more confused than I was at the beginning.

What I have learned so far:

A big word like Taxonomy is amazing. It gets wielded like a broadsword, (most of the time by those not strong enough to lift it), to bedazzle the rest of us. In truth, there are some good post here that do a good job of explaining the definition of Taxonomy. I even found a post that gave a nice example of Category hierarchy, but did not offer and implementation example. My apologies for not bookmarking it and pasting here for your reference.

In conclusion to my rant let me say it is not the lack of understanding categories and structure but rather setting up and plugging in the terms thats got me, ( maybe others that posting for help), in this state of confusion. Below I have listed some scenarios that may open the door for identifying the howto of Taxonomy in Drupal.

My site has several types of content (story, blog, event...) Several but not all should be tagged with location. So searches or directory listings for a specific location will serve up these tagged nodes. My hierarchy for Location:

Country
-Region
--state1
---city1
---city2
--state2

Possible solution: I created a category(vocabulary)labeled Location; assigned the content types, setting multi select & related; added terms multi level hierarchy. I thought about letting this be free tagged but this web deals with a limited geographic and all locations are identified, i hope.

Ideally I would like to make this vocabulary available for optional tagging in some nodes like story or blog while having it mandatory for others like events. can this be done w/o duplicating vocabularies? My first thought was to create a term (i'll call it -none-) that could be selected by the optional content, so that I could set the vocabulary to mandatory.

Additionally; upon creating content (story) I am now faced with multiple selection boxes for tagging the story. I can't help but wonder if this may be an issue for confusion for the site users who post in these content types.

For Blog I set the vocabulary to free tag & optional. Reason being this content type is for the members and the topics will be as varied as the individual users.

Ideas and examples of how others have implemented their categories or overcome similar obstacles would be a great help. maybe with enough examples/ scenarios a Taxonomy tutorial will develop.

I will be following along here as well as post some more of my trial and error method of Taxonomy. :)