By MM-Steven on

Hello,

I'm pretty new to Drupal but I am enjoying using it, one thing that I am confused about is 'Taxonomy & Content types' I'm sure is pretty simple to clarify for anyone with more than a few weeks knowledge.

So here we go..

Whats the difference between me setting up Taxonomy over different Content types

Should I set up different Content types i.e.

Local News
Sports News

or should I set them up as Taxonomy and use Page and Story, then select them as Local News or Sports News.

Or should I do both

Thank you in advance

Steven

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Sc0tt’s picture

Sc0tt commented

Taxonomy is basically the different categories or sections of your website like sports, local, world, school, etc. and you would want to make a taxonomy term for each of them.

Content Types are the different types of content you put into those categories. 99% of the time they will be the default "story" content type.

So, lets say you want to make a sports story appear in your sports section.

First, go to http://www.example.com/admin/content/taxonomy and click on the "Add vocabulary" tab.

Next, give it a name like "newspaper sections" and don't forget to click a check next to the "Story" content type. Hit the submit button.

Next, you want to add categories (taxonomies) like your sports, local, school, etc. to this vocabulary. Do to this, click on the "add terms" button and add a few of the sections for your newspaper, Sports, Local, etc.

Now, you want to go under "Create Content" and add a "Story". Give it a title, type in some test text in the body field and you should notice a selection list called "Newspaper Section" with the sections like sports, local, etc. that you added.

That's the falling asleep quick help. good luck.
Scott

MM-Steven’s picture

MM-Steven commented

Cheers for the reply, I get how to create taxonomy, I'm just confused as to why you would create a content type instead of a taxonomy?

Does it do anything special, it seems to confuse things for me. I like the idea of page and story then linking them to a taxonomy category, this make sense, for news articles.. sorry I should have said my taxonomy is set up like this..

News
Local News
Regional News
Sports News

As I have added the events module I can see it has created a Events Content Type, which is fine but for the news and general posts it makes sense to use page & story, instead of having each news category as a content type and not using page and story.

is this the way to do it..

sorry, I'm just looking for some confirmation that I'm doing it correctly..

Eugene Dubois’s picture

Eugene Dubois commented

I think you should see it like this:

Content type: a different type of publishing comparable with: magazine, book, website, newspaper
taxonomy: a different subject.

So a content type magazine can have a subject sports, or nature
a book can be sports, or nature or ....

kerryhall’s picture

kerryhall commented

How do I have a primary link for each Taxonomy catagory?

davidlark’s picture

davidlark commented

Content types can be themed differently by using different templates.
Custom content types can have fields added to them using CCK.
Although the Views module can sort by content type, taxonomies are meant to queried and sorted through.

arh1’s picture

arh1 commented

content types are like templates or placeholders for a certain set of content that you'll add to your site. you should create a new content type if you plan to add a set of content to your site that varies from your existing content types in regards to criteria like these:

* will the content need any special/unique fields
* what type of URLs will the content use
* will comments be allowed
* how will the content be tagged/categorized
* what type of navigation will be provided for the content, and will it be promoted
* will the content author be important
* will the content be edited once it's published
* will the content be presented/styled distinctly

taxonomy is used for grouping/organizing content.

so, in your example, "news" sounds to me like only one content type, "local", "sports", "regional", etc as taxonomy terms.

yakker’s picture

yakker commented

Wish I had stumbled on this thread 8 hours ago! Nicely explained, and my head is hurting from coming close to this conceptualization myself.
:)

So:

I have set up a scheme of content types, and I have a particular taxonomy in place. For example: one of my content types is "Announcement." With CCK, I've customized it to force such information as phone number, website, contact_name, start_date, and end_date into their own fields (so that I can sort, filter, do whatever with 'em later - way easier than trying to find 'em in a block of text). I also have a few tags set up in a vocabulary: News, Education, Product, etc.

For my content type, Announcements, free tagging makes sense: you might make an announcement about an event (News), a new course being offered somewhere (Education), or a new Product feature (Product), or some combination of those.

But I also have a content type: "How-To." The How-To is intended to be a scheme for providing step-by-step instructions on how to use a particular item. Certain roles have access to it (Instructors, for example). How-To's should therefore always be tagged as "Education." I want to build that right into the How-To content type so that I don't have to risk a user getting lazy with multi-tagging and just tagging it with "Product" (or some other tag).

Can I do this? And if so, I'd love to know how.

Cheers!