Taxonomy Index Page

An index page for a taxonomy vocabulary is not available as of today.

Please read Jeremy Epstein's posting here (http://drupal.org/node/20836#comment-49208) for a better understanding of this issue and also his proposed cateogry module that seeks to remedy this problem:
http://drupal.org/node/23730

I have a structured site with each term pointing to a page and each page listing the pages under it. I used taxonomy_menu and taxonomy_multi_edit to add the menu. I then added code to a block to list the entries under the current page.

The code shown here is added after the code shown in http://drupal.org/node/28688. The result is a page of text then a list of the page summaries for the pages below the current page.

I added the following code to my .theme file. The code selects the node ids from the database so that they can be sorted by title. you can change the sort and add other selection criteria.

$url_node = $_GET['q'];
$url_alias = drupal_get_path_alias($_GET['q']) . '/';
$url_map = drupal_get_path_map();
$selected_nodes = array();
foreach($url_map as $url_key => $url_value)
	{
	if(substr($url_key, 0, strlen($url_alias)) == $url_alias)
		{
		$url_remainder = substr($url_key, strlen($url_alias));
		if(strpos($url_remainder, '/') === false)
			{
			$value_parts = explode('/', $url_value);
			if($value_parts[0] == 'node')
				{
				$selected_nodes[] = $value_parts[1];
				}
			else
				{
				$output .= 'Alias: ' . $url_key . ', system: ' . $url_value . '<br />';
				}
			}
		}
	}
if(count($selected_nodes) > 0)
	{
	$node_ids = db_query(db_rewrite_sql(
		'select n.nid from {node} n'
		. ' where n.nid in(' . implode(', ', $selected_nodes) . ')'
		. ' order by n.title'));
	while($node_1 = db_fetch_object($node_ids))
		{
		$output .= node_view(node_load(array('nid' => $node_1->nid)), 1);
		}
	}

The taxonomy assoc menu in cvs sounds like it does what you want (I haven't tried it yet myself).

What we've done along similar lines is to use the taxonomy_context module, and put the 'static' content for that term in the terms description. The HTML content we put in the description (including links to node we think are important etc) is then shown above the node listings.

You can also use the sticky attribute to keep certain nodes at the top of the taxonomy listings.

In answer to some of your questions, andrew:

1. I agree with the advice already given in this thread, to try both the taxonomy_assoc and the taxonomy_context modules. These two modules are your only hope if you wish to treat some of your categories as an 'index page', and put some descriptive content in them. Taxonomy_context is the 'lighter' option, as it just displays a plain-text description with a term. Taxonomy_assoc is suitable if plain text is not enough, i.e. if you need to embed an actual node on a category page. I wrote taxonomy_assoc because the 'lighter' option wasn't enough for my needs :-).
2. Getting the node listing for a term's page to display in a 'custom' way is not easily done. The 'downloads' page on drupal.org is actually generated by the project module, not the taxonomy module (although I think project.module still uses taxonomy terms under the surface). This is how they got it to look different to a regular node listing. There are some modules out there for custom display of node listings, e.g. the article module, but taxonomy itself doesn't let you customise a node listing. You could also try experimenting with your theme - you might be able to theme a particular set of terms differently, but I don't know how.
3. Also, play around with the optional 'depth' argument you can put on taxonomy terms. E.g. taxonomy/term/7/3 will list all nodes tagged with term 7, and all nodes tagged with children of term 7, to a depth of 3 (default depth is 0). By specifying a depth, and perhaps aliasing the depth-specific URL, you might be able to get an empty listing. Unfortunately, you can't specify a depth of -1, so this makes it a bit harder.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh