Tree-like navigation of articles

I understand your frustration with the hierarchy problem.

I solved it in two ways:

1. I selected URL aliases for my pages using a hierachical naming convention
2. I wrote a hierarchical module

(I also wrote some code so I could show you my code, you can view that code here.)

I have placed the documentation for using the module at my web site:
madscientistroom.org/drupal/About/Drupal/Using-the-hierarchy-module

Good luck!

Do you have an example site showing /aaaa/bbbb working using the method you describe?

You can see it in action here: www.ciosa.org.in/members/individuals and www.ciosa.org.in/programmes/networking, where individuals and networking are terms under the vocabs "Members" and "Programmes" respectively. I assume this is what you meant by /aaaa/bbbb/cccc

This pulls up all the nodes associated with the term 'individuals' and 'networking'. The site is very basic at the moment and I haven't added menus for the hierarchical sub-sections (networking and individuals). There are other sections for which aliases are set up, but don't have any nodes associated yet. Also, I haven't enabled any breadcrumbs. The bottomline is that aliasing for a hierarchical site structure works, but is an involved process in Drupal.

The "it" refers to the vocabulary term itself. In Drupal, *terms* in a vocabulary are automatically given a kind of index page that lists nodes under that term. This is how I was able to alias those pages to match them with the sub-sections. Unfortunately, the vocabulary itself (like programmes or members in my site above) does not get this kind of an index page. If you think of a vocabulary as the home page of a particular section in a hierarchical site structure, it seems reasonable to expect that this home page will aggregate the nodes relating to the terms under that vocabulary.

I have tried two options so far for this problem, each incomplete:

1.) The first is to create a manual alias for all your taxonomy terms for one vocabulary (taxonomy/term/1,2,3) by mapping it to that vocabulary (in my case, "members" or "programmes"). This *does* pull up all the nodes associated with the terms of that vocabulary. The only problem is that the title for the page is displayed as term_name1, term_name2, etc instead of the vocabulary name, as it ideally should. It seems you can hack through this by enabling the locale module, adding a new language (say, en-modified), searching for the term_name1, term_name2 etc., string. However, the last time I tried this, the string text field would not accept such a longish string. I also wonder whether this would change all instances of the term_name on the entire site- not a good idea since the terms need to have their own names on their own pages.

2.) Use the updated taxonomy_context module based on Jerermy Epstein's work at www.greenash.net.au (look at the taxonomy tutorials). The new module gives excellent, taxonomy based breadcrumbs and also a kind of index page for the vocabulary. My only problem is that it seems to functions like a master index page that just lists vocabularies instead of listing the nodes for a particular vocabulary. I could be wrong about this too.

To create a menu that points to your taxonomy terms, please look at http://drupal.org/node/21476#comment-37106

I am not an expert drupal user- this is just the result of my personal experimentation with trying to set up a hierarchical site.

Last but not the least, pathauto is probably one of Drupal's best modules. You can't do without it to create hierarchical sites. And, jwells, to answer your question, it was Mike Ryan who was trying to incorporate the index page functionality for vocabs into pathauto. Try looking at the issue pages for pathauto for the latest updates.