By johnbeamer on

I was hoping someone with a little more experience maybe able to help explain the best practice relationship between taxonomy and primary links.

Suppose you have a site (a newspaper/ magazine) with the following categories (there will be children of these categories too):
News | Politics | Sport | Entertainment | Business

and three geographies:
USA | Asia | Europe | Africa

Now it is pretty straight forward that you'll have two vocabularies. One, "topic" for to classify the content according to whether it is News, Politics, Sport, Entertainment ... and two, "region" for the appropriate region.

Question: What is the best way to select your primary links?

Should you link your primary links just to one of the vocabularies or doesn't it matter. In this instance I'd imagine that it makes sense to have "topic" as your primary link.

Okay, suppose you decide to mix the primary links between "topics" and "regions" then the designer faces a problem. If a node cuts across two of the "primary links" and you want to highlight and active-trail how do you decide which to highlight? Or do you simply highlight both? Question: What is the best way to handle this?

The latter solution feels messy. I think you'd only want to highlight one category ... therefore I think, for this type of newspaper website, mixing vocabularies as primary links is wrong.

I guess another option is to creake CCK types for each differnent type of content and have a seperate vocubularly linked to each content type. Again in this scenario you wouldn't mix vocabularies for primary links -- it is the same (effectively) as just using the "topic" as the primary links.

I guess what I want get some other perspectives on is how taxonomy should relate to the navigation (primary links/ secondary links) structure of the site. What is best practice and what are the watch outs?

Thanks

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x, Drupal 5.x, Drupal 6.x

Comments

bwv’s picture

bwv commented

It makes eminent sense to develop a navigation menu based on taxonomy. Primary links, for its part, in and of itself is just another menu. You can have two (or more) of these menus, thus allowing the user to navigate either by topic (menu 1) or region (menu 2). Or, you can use primary links (topic) and secondary links (geography) to create a nice navigation menu.

These menus, when populated with data, also become blocks, which can be positioned at various points of the site. Or you can create suckerfish menus with themes provided by roopletheme.com.

I do not have any insight in best practices vis-a-vis this issue; I don't think there are any hard and fast rules. What I would suggest is that you first develop your taxonomy fully (unless you already have) then experiment; sometimes it is more expedient to simply develop than it is to try to conceptualize what it is you wish to develop.

The taxonomy context module is a nice way of presenting data in block form; it might be useful to experiment with it to get a better feel for how you want to present your menus.
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robdinardo’s picture

robdinardo commented

In Drupal 6, how can I add one vocabulary (title) and its terms to the primary links menu? In my primary links, I currently have something like this...

  • Colors
    • Red
    • Blue
    • Green
  • Fish
    • Trout
    • Pike
    • Salmon

... I want to add a link that has vocabulary title with list of terms in the primary links, like so...

  • Colors
    • Red
    • Blue
    • Green
  • Fish
    • Trout
    • Pike
    • Salmon
  • Vocab Title
    • Term1
    • Term2
    • Term3

I have a block that displays what I need for the block, but how do I get this in the Primary Links? Here is the code:

<?php
/* vocabulary ID here */
$vid = 1;
$terms = taxonomy_get_tree($vid);
print "<ul class=\"menu\">";
foreach ( $terms as $term ) {
if (end($terms) == $term) {$last = 'class="last"';}
print "<li $last>".
l($term->name,'taxonomy/term/'.$term->tid, array('title' => $term->name)).
"</li>";
} /* end foreach */
print "</ul>";
?>

Anyone have any idea? I have read post mentioning the usage of Views and Taxonomy Menu, but I can't seem to figure it out. Other posts talk about using a custom template to create the primary links, but I figure since Views and the new Menu system in Drupal 6, there is probably a way to do this without resorting to custom PHP?

Here are some posts I found: http://drupal.org/node/140491 ; http://drupal.org/node/136519 ; http://drupal.org/node/264783

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

I inject it using hook_preprocess_page(). So, here is the code (for secondary links - primary is the same):


function gw_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
  $variables['secondary_links'] = gw_secondary_links();
}

function gw_secondary_links() {
  // Our secondary links come from the first level of categories vocab
  $terms = taxonomy_get_tree(VID_CHANNELS, 0, -1, 1);
  foreach ($terms as $term) {
    $links["gw-primary-$term->tid"] = array(
      'title' => "$term->name", 
      'href' => "channel/$term->tid",
    );
  }
  if (user_access('access administration pages')) {
    $links['gw-primary-admin'] = array(
      'title' => t('Administer'),
      'href' => 'admin',
    );
  }
  return $links;
}
giorgio79’s picture

giorgio79 commented

http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_menu

My Drupal sites:

himtuna’s picture

himtuna commented

yes after seeing all that hardcore php codes, I was feeling the same thing.
Taxonomy Menu.
( But there is a little problem with the mysql. just manually execute the mysql queries found in the .install file)

mikou’s picture

mikou commented

Hello,

Taxonomy_menu is exactly the module I use. But I can't find out how to list the terms in the primary menu and not the vocabulary.
Actually, I have :

  • category (my vacabulary)
    • item1 (my terms)
    • item2
    • item3
    • item4

How to list only item1, 2, 3 and 4 without category as parent in the primary menu ?
Thanks