taxonomy vs. paths vs. navigation vs. usability..?

is it close to the needs of your bounty? because it works:

As a temporary solution, I've written a module which uses custom_url_rewrite to change all taxonomy_menu URLs to the correct taxonomy/term/... form, and works with pathauto URLs.

This works great on the top nice_menus on my site, http://levavie.com

More info: http://drupal.org/node/192493#comment-633741

Amnon
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I am new to drupal, but it has been a month since I have been reading and digesting the concepts of CMS and especially taxonomy, and I was convinced..

When I jumped into the wagon, I have started a new website (localhosted) that is around a book(Arabic):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1879708167/ref=cm_cr_dp_orig_subj (recent english translation of the book)

My TOC consists of 1304 table rows (heirachical indeed.)

To this point, I have directly ported this TOC into drupal backend mysql tables as follows: (Fresh Drupal 5 Site)

1) Create a proper vocabulary entry and assign different node types(Book, Page .etc.) [I disabled free tagging for this vocabulary which is actually the book name => as this would disturb the toc by just adding extra term_data..] ... so ... the TOC is mirrored statically into Taxonomy. at least for that specifc vocabulary.
2) Inserted the term_data entries
3) Insert the corresponding term_heirarchy properly

Every thing is perfect, also beer in mind that I have switched-off the free tagging for the book

After having to rearrange things and having to repeat the same steps above... (and testing adding extra terms from drupal interface) => I came with some errors of duplicate keys...after researching,, it was that old system methodology of relying on the sequences table, also i was not fogetting to reset the InnoDB autoincrement values for each run.

I knew Drupal 6 is not any more relying on table locking and has depreciated the "sequences table" .... that was a breeze for me, so I have installed drupal 6b3 fresh on my latest wamp build.

Well, yes, I could create a new public vocabulary and allow users to add their tags here.(to work as cross tagging while not harming my first vocabulary structure - which is the actual book' TOC)

very neat...

Now,

I am confronted with almost the same issues:

1) I have huge list of terms (thing are yet going to increase when I add more book) (expect 5000+ terms)
==> Do I have every time I derive an explanation page or comment for that certain book page, do I have to scroll down through 5000 terms from the select combo....(WOW, NO)
2) Do I have to maintain a book herachy to be aligned with the Taxonomy TOC (I could do this with a script, that is not the techincal problem), besides the whole book is digitzed already 3000+ pages., I am not bothering to retype, but I have my links to every page already in place.

By creating the drupal book-node pages, I would be putting the http link to the actual physicall page into every book-node page,

My whole intention of this project is to allow me to picture out my understandings and jot them down along with adding some more diagrams and mind-maps that help the reading researcher.

I am going to use the commenting feature for personal commenting and not public commenting (readonly)

I am creating an online reference of personal notes (text + graphical diagrams), that is readable to the visitors,

____________________________________________

The solution I envision at least should have the following features:

* Implement heirachical selects to facilitate fetching deep heirachical terms. (then pass the selcted term to an aggregate text area, or maybe drag and drop)
* Have a themed view of my taxonomies... i.e. for every term that I have created any derived content(at least one), I want a small icon appear next to that term indicating it has been consumed or described (at least once)
* have a module which zooms into the tree branch of my existing term heirarchy, and allows me to step up or drill to the next branch ==> depending on exsting context as a reference.
* have a module which exports my selected taxonomy vocabularies and the associated terms to an XML ALONG WITH THIER EVER ASSOCIATD NODES - Ahem, for mobility, (even changing ID's where possible as far as the referencial integrity is maintained.)

That was a starter.

I am a Lasso programmer (lassosoft.com) not a php guy, Otherwise I would have contributed these modules, I know the above is simple to implement, Guru phper's, help!

I can see that so many poeple out there have good ideas, but not able to implement them,
Also being open source, other fewer elite who are good at drupal API are under pressure to serve others,.

All the best wishes to the drupal community and all those who helped shape this cool tool.

Backgorund:
It is very difficult to make multiple selections on big heirachical term branches/trees which span thousands of related terms,
e.g. we loose site easily of what is selected and what is not, also one mistake could be very costly.

Proposed feature 1
* enable drag&drop of terms into an optional selection basket/tray/list
* Also, create a tiny trash icon, where we can drop non-required term(s)

Proposed Feature 2
Will, for simplicity and to avoid confusion to users, this feature can be implemented as a separate co-module which is mapped to its own unique content-block apart.

It is around two features which work with each other in synergy:
1) User is able to define query criteria, or selection rules OR directly utilize the rules of the views module which are assumed to be predifined there in the views db-schema.
2) Display the tree of terms in a nice visual way somehow, but, the terms which are part of reference view to be highlited in different color or background-color, as an indication that this very term has already been designiated somewhere in the website (that depened of the views filter which is preset especially by the user for this purpose.)

Usage Scenario

- Let us suppose that I have 3000+ taxonomy terms under one/several vocabularies...
- These 3000+ are mirroring a book of Bible / Quran / Physics / Chemistry / Encyclopedia ...etc... just think of researchers point of view. (that Vocabulary is not allowing free tagging)(Must Select one)
- The Taxonomy is made to be a mirror of the Table of Contents for any of the above references.
- I am a member of a team/class, and we are assigned a project where we have to collaboratively describe and summarize any of the above volumes.
- Plan is that for every taxonomy (TOC Node) which exists as a term, we are asked to create a matching book page (mirroring the same hiearachy in terms of parent/child as in the hiearachy of the relevent taxonoy terms - as we said earlier)
- Accondingly, we are going to tag that book-page with that relevant taxonomy term as a must. (essential tag)
- Additionaly, we are having other special vocabuly which serve as a different name space for free tagging (optional tags), i.e. that vocabulary is configered to allow free tagging.
- So far, things look nice, neet, organized, but we miss one more important element.......................
- At this level, we might be able to install the views module and then create a filter that would display the list of the pages which belong to book X, ...
- ... and since we know that every page which was created in that book must have been at least on term from our essential TOC vocabulry; then we can take the same query result as an array which hold the ids if the fetched taxonomy terms and then pass that array to the custom module as mentioned above to cater for the masking/highligting functionality which is all about.

.............. We wanted that feautre - which is all about here - To be able to look into that custom block, and by reazling which taxonomy terms are highlighted; the whole working group knows how much progress is being done, and the terms which are NOT hightligted tell us that we still need to work on summarazing these terms into the new relavent book pages/blogs/polls/..etc.

I hope this is clear enough to communicate the need of having to be able to take control of volumteric taxonomy implementaitons.