By i8ramin on

Hi Everyone. I just installed a fresh copy of 4.6 and downloaded some 4.6 modules. I'm tryin go understand this whole taxonomy stuff and how it related to Nodes and Categories. I've read some of the documentation, did some searches on the site and on google, but I just wanna get a nice friendly reply from someone who knows what their doing before I can be certain about things.

I'm basically trying to create a site that will be used to post 5 articles every week. Each article will belong to a category (Who, What, Where, When and Why). Its that simple. I will have content providers to create the articles and maybe some editors to go in and fix spelling mistakes and whatnot. I would like my 5 articles to appear on the main page (according to my own theme, but thats a different issue.) I also do not want my users to see a lot of the existing menu items (like create content, my account, etc.)

When I have this part figured out, I would like to be able to send out weekly email newsletters of my articles to my users. This should be done automatically every week at a certain time. I'm guessing I can use the MassMailer module? Or maybe there is a "Newsletter" module I don't know about? However, I don't think the massmailer module has been updated to 4.6 yet, so I'll have to wait a bit.

So my first concern right now is, how do I setup my categories in Drupal? Do I use taxonomies? nodes? categories? Are my articles represented as Pages or Stories? Are they Books? I'm a bit confused as to the differences of each one and what I would need. Oh, and all my articles are read only, meaning no comments or anything. To get a better understanding of what I want, please visit www.dailycandy.com. I'm tryin go create something just like that.

I appreciate the feedback.

Comments

Jaza’s picture

Jaza commented

Taxonomy, and the mass of specific jargon associated with it, is one of the most common causes of confusion for new Drupal users (as I explain in my article on taxonomy). First, let me clarify some of this jargon for you:

Taxonomy
A Drupal module that allows you to organise your nodes, using a classification scheme that you define.
Categories
Basically, just another word for taxonomy. Although the module is called taxonomy, the menu item where you define your taxonomy scheme is labelled categories. Ironically, this was done originally because nobody knew what 'taxonomy' meant, so they thought if they gave the menu item a more user-friendly name, it would reduce the confusion. In my opinion, the result has been quite the opposite.
Vocabulary
A classification scheme that you can apply to your nodes. You can have as many vocabularies as you want, and for each one, you can choose things such as what nodes it can be applied to. Common vocabularies include sections, importance levels, moods, genres, etc.
Term
A category that you can apply to your nodes. Each term belongs to a vocabulary. For each vocabulary, you can specify if terms can have sub-terms, if multiple terms (in the one vocab) can be assigned to one node, if all nodes are required to have a term (from that vocab) applied to them, etc. Example of terms could be: 'news' and 'articles' (for the sections vocab); 'minor' and 'urgent' (for the importance levels vocab); or 'angry' and 'soothing' (for the moods vocab).

So now that we've got all that sorted out, here's the setup I think would be most suitable for your needs:

  • Your articles should all be represented as stories. The page content type is more for static information pages, such as 'about us', and 'FAQ'. The story content type is recommended for text-based articles (can have other things too, e.g. embedded images - but that's a separate issue) that are posted on a regular basis. Do not use books! They are only for storing nodes in a tree-like hierarchy - you won't be able to assign categories to your nodes if you use books, because the book module is not compatible with taxonomy.
  • Disabling comments for all articles can be done very easily, by configuring the options for the story node type. In fact, you can just disable the whole comment module for your site, if you want. You can also override these options for an individual node, if you wish.
  • The taxonomy structure for your site would look something like this, I imagine (assuming I've understood your needs correctly):
    Vocabulary: can be any name, even just 'category' - maybe you could call it 'wh...', since all your terms start with 'wh'.
    Settings: term can be applied to stories; terms required for stories; each node can only have one term applied to it; no sub-terms; no related terms.
    Terms: 'who', 'what', 'where', 'when', and 'why'.
  • You can disable any menu items you want in the menu settings page. You can even disable the whole main navigation menu if you want - then your users won't see any of the default menu items.

I don't know about automated mailing of articles.. I'll leave that for someone else to answer on. But I hope my taxonomy advice has helped.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

carl ditzler’s picture

carl ditzler commented

This is good --- could this be added to the handbook? Jeremy's writings should be preserved :)

i8ramin’s picture

i8ramin commented

Wow, thanks man. That was a great explanation. I (think) I understand things better now. I'll try out your suggestions and see how it all fits together. I'm also going through your article. Very useful indeed. I appreciate the quick (and comprehendable) response.

i8ramin’s picture

i8ramin commented

Here's a good post I found regarding the newsletter / massmailer module:
http://drupal.org/node/18709

micha_1977’s picture

micha_1977 commented

you won't be able to assign categories to your nodes if you use books, because the book module is not compatible with taxonomy

is that new to the 4.6 release ? In 4.5.2 it does work for me, i can assign terms to book pages, just like "normal" pages

Jaza’s picture

Jaza commented

hmmm.. i heard somewhere that in 4.5.x, you can't assign terms to book pages. Perhaps it was only a problem in an older release, e.g. 4.4.x. Don't know what the situation is in 4.6.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

I never heard of such limitation before.

On my sites, I assign categories to all nodes, including book pages, without any hitch.

I am running 4.5 at present.
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ghankstef’s picture

ghankstef commented

I set up a taxonomy as described above with just one term. I created 2 test Lorem Ipsum articles and they show up under this url http://138.192.45.87/drupal/taxonomy/term/1

but the arcticles page is blank (http://138.192.45.87/drupal/article).

Where did I go wrong? (Not sure you will be able to access my computer to see this outside or network but thought I would give the url all the same)

iowamf’s picture

iowamf commented

I'm experimenting w/ taxonomy as well (great articles at http://www.greenash.net.au ) and want to figure out how to do the "where".

Goal: require each post to have a fully qualified "where", ie:

country, state/province, city

It could be done with one giant category, ie.

Planet
--US
----California
--------LA
--------SanFran
----Texas
--------Dallas
--------Houston
--Europe
----Germany
--------Munich
--------Berlin

and make the "planet" category a requirement for each post.

However, that would be a *huge* list and would require the user to scroll thru every possible option. I'd rather have many "smart" pull downs, ie,

country: (US, Canada, China, ...)
state/province:
city:

Thanks & Regards -

coupet’s picture

coupet commented

Very good feature request!

I will be interested in suggested solution to "Location" based categories.

How can this feature be added to the profile module ?

Apache is bandwidth limited, PHP is CPU limited, and MySQL is memory limited.