brenda003, chx, merlinofchaos, Totakeke and myself had a discussion tonight in #drupal related to the whole taxonomy/categories debate, and came to the conclusion that 90% of the user confusion doesn't come from the terminology, but from the UI being simply awful.

Totakeke brought up a good point that 90% of the time, what users want is a flat list, whether it's free-tagging or not. Any other usage is "advanced." So what if we made the UI reflect that?

At admin/user/roles there is a simple text field and an "Add" button. For further configuration, you use the "edit [permissions]" link. So we could get away with, on admin/content/taxonomy/add/vocabuary, having two fields along with an "Add" button:

         Name: [                                      ]
Content types: [ ] Page
               [ ] Story

This would instantly add a simple vocabulary, ready for term addition. For more advanced options, you click "edit vocabulary" and set options like "required" and "free tagging" and whatnot.

We could still keep the "Add" tab at the top which took you to the full-blown form to set everything at once. We could call it "Add (advanced users)" or something, maybe. That way, it doesn't become a 2-step process, thus slowing you down, if you already know what you want.

Comments

theborg’s picture

theborg commented

Yes, good point and what I mostly do is enter terms so it should be something similar to do it, like having a vocabulary fixed at the top and then enter terms in a table/grid.

[animals][edit]
+--------------+--------+
+     cat      + edit   +
+     dog      + edit   +
+--------------+--------+
+              +        +
+--------------+--------+

More advanced techniques: move terms from one voc. to another, delete more that one term, etc. Buy maybe i saw something of this on S.O.C.'07 project of taxonomy.

keith.smith’s picture

keith.smith commented

Oops. There's too many taxonomy issues in the queue right now.

I should have posted my ASCII art entry here, instead of here.

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented
Title: UI simplification for Vocabulary addition » UI simplification for taxonomy addition
Version: 6.x-dev » 7.x-dev

Bumping to 7.x. Slightly widening scope if that's not too cheeky.

Google SOC project is now taxonomy manager
Switching terms between vocabularies is handled by taxonomy switch. It'd be nice to take the best of those two modules and merge bits into core for D7.

Things that would be really handy in the taxonomy ui, but aren't yet:
* an autocomplete textarea in the admin interface for quick addition of terms. Then you could drag and drop them into hierarchies once created, add some more, drag some more etc. This combined with the one click "vocabulary add" would mean a two page process for making a vocabulary and some terms instead of 3 or 4 now.

* checkboxes for multiple delete in the "list" view.

* autocomplete or drill downs for parent and relationship selection to remove the huge select lists. This would require validation/prompting for actual terms if it was autocomplete (or some very clever creation of terms and hierarchies on the fly) - some discussion on that in this issue. Also drill down and/or autocomplete options for hierarchies and multiple hierarchies on the node/add forms. Same validation issues as above.

* D6 book module style switching of terms between vocabularies.

quicksketch’s picture

quicksketch
he/him
commented

Keeping on my radar for D7. This would be a glorious place to experiment/introduce an AHAH form submission. Type, click bam. No reload addition of the new element. Of course, things get sticky when dealing with validation, etc... it's just something to think about for now.

andypost’s picture

andypost
he/him
Primary language Russian
commented

Is this issue still valid?

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Not really.