How would YOU describe Drupal's taxonomy system to a newb?

"You can create vocabularies, containing keywords."

"You can specify the relationship and use of those keywords."

"You can tag your content with those keywords."

"You can browse and access your content by keywords."

Seems straightforward to me.

--R.J.
http://www.electric-escape.net/

Admittedly, I'm used to writing help text for VERY inexperienced users, so if I repeat myself or beat a dead horse, apologies. :-)

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Drupal's 'Taxonomy' system can sound daunting, but it doesn't have to be. When all the fancy language is stripped away, Taxonomy is about one thing: organizing your site by attaching descriptive terms to each piece of content.

Those terms might describe what section of your site a particular page belongs to. They might describe what topics are discussed in a given blog post, or what region of the country a photograph was taken in. These terms are organized in separate 'Vocabularies' so that recipe ingredients don't get mixed up with cities in Texas when you're trying to find out what travel-logs were written in Houston, or what soups use potatos.

Setting up these Vocabularies, and the descriptive terms that belong to them, is the first step in organizing your Drupal site. There are different kinds of vocabularies, and understanding how they differ can help you decide the best way to categorize your content.

1. Lists of pre-defined terms -- a 'flat' vocabulary
2. Hierarchies of pre-defined terms -- a 'tree' vocabulary
3. Buckets full of terms -- a 'free-tagging' vocabulary

For example, let's say you're setting up a photo portfolio, and using Taxonomy to keep things organized. First, you might create a 'flat' vocabulary for basic organization called 'Photo Type.' To that vocabulary, you would add the terms 'Portrait,' 'Stop-Action,' 'Landscape,' and so on. Next, to keep track of where the photographs were taken, you might create a hierarchial vocabulary called 'Location.' To it, you could add terms like 'Europe' and 'United States.' In a hierarchial vocabulary, each of those terms can also have sub-terms like 'France' and 'Illinois.' This makes it possible to tag a photo once with the term 'London' and retrieve it later with a broader request like 'Show me all the photos taken in Great Britain.' Finally, to capture notes about each photograph that would be hard to plan in advance, you could add a 'free tagging' vocabulary called 'Keywords.' Rather than defining the terms in advance, a free tagging vocabulary lets you enter in new terms each time you post a piece of content. If two pieces of content share a term, they'yer automatically connected to each other.

With those three vocabularies in place, any new photograph you post to your site can be quickly categorized. Whenever you post a new image, Drupal offers you a list of the available terms in the 'Photo Type' and 'Location vocabularies AND a place to type in terms for your 'Keywords' vocabulary. When posting a photo of your brother's wedding, you might select a Photo Type of 'Portrait,' a Location of 'Paris' (if that's where he was married, naturally!) and type in 'wedding' and 'brother' as keywords.

If you're used to other CMS or blogging systems, these different vocabulary types might be familiar as 'categories' or 'sections' or 'keywords.' It's important to note that nothing requires you to use these different Drupal vocabularies, and different kinds of content can use different vocabularies when it makes sense. News articles and Images might share 'Keywords', but 'Photo Type' obviously only makes sense for one.

Mixing and matching these techniques in Drupal allows you to create the organizational system that best suits your needs. Getting used to it can be tricky at first, but if you take the time to think through your site's organization, the results are worth it.

--
Jeff Eaton | Click Here To Find Out Why Drupal "Sucks"

Taxonomy lets you put your content into categories.

That's it.

I'm so sick of explaining the in's and out's of vocabularies, free tagging, hierarchies, structure, etc - from now on, I'm sticking to the simplest definition I can think of. Perhaps also explain (if it's an extra-curious newbie you're talking to) that terms are the actual categories, and that vocabularies are used to group terms together. Massively over-simplified, I know. But that's what people will understand.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

Well, not that I don´t like to read manual pages and handbook. I love to read (especially big heavy old dusted books I can find in the library!), but sometimes I think the Drupal handbooks are a bit too much textual. You know, some graphics here and there help newbies to understand the way things work. Or at least they give our eyes a little bit of rest.

I found the explanations on the above posts not only clarifying but very well written. I belive they should go into official documentation.

But it is true though that Drupal suffers from a "Geek" stigma. The so called "newbies" don´t seem to understand the way Drupal is supposed to work and usualy get angry about not getting answers at the forum and either in the manual pages.

But hey, I´m still on the geek side! I think that if someone wants to have they´re very own feature-rich comunity-driven website they better consider becoming a geek too. Building a website is not easy. The CMS is not the only problem.

But back to the pictures. I think Drupal has a serious problem of presentation. It look´s very geeky and complicated for non-programmers. Drupal.org too look´s kind of harsh too.I think that should be really not because Drupal is not and inherently hard to use software. I believe Mr. Douglass started this thread in a effort to make Drupal better understood. So I will outline my opinions about some Drupal problems, and, obviously, follow them with some ideas for a solution :

1st Problem: Newbies complain they don´t know what the heck Taxonomy is; why they need Nodes; they don´t understand the administration menu; and so and so. I guess most people don´t understand the abstract concepts behind Drupal implementation, and want it to work like some other software they have used before (Word Press, Mambo, Typo3, Nucleus, etc.).

Solution: Unless you guys of the developer team finds out a way to make a system that installs and configures itself without the need of human action, like some type of super AI, there is no way to make dynamic website creation more easy. But we can making the experience of learnig about Drupal more enjoyable and rewarding ! Tutorials, FAQ´s, begginers guides, graphics with arrows and boxes, examples, things like that can work like a brige between the newbie and the havily technical documentation. After you had learned what the softwere does, you feel a lot more motivated to learn how it works.

And, having worked about 2 years with distance education, I must say that color and movement take major role in catching people interest.

2nd Problem: Support is crucial for any type of software. Being Drupal distrubuted to the comunity free of cost, the only way to provide support is using volunteer work. That is not exactly a real problem, but some people forget about that and get very angry about the lack of support they receive.

Solution: Well, that´s a tough one. There seems to be no other way but the comunity forum. I don´t like forums very much, but maybe the new search engine being developed will help a lot people to find answers to frequent questions. I guess the creation of a FAQ section should be at least considered.

3rd Problem: People at the Drupal forums seem to argue a lot. I don´t know, maybe it´s with the internet business, but I think there should be more *peace* in drupal.org forums. I strongly belive that it has something to do with the always blue and white site theme.I think it should be changed. It looks like hospital stuff, you know, bright lights, long white corridors, everything so cool and clean, makes me a bit nervous. I don´t know, forget about problem 3 for now :).

These sugestions should realy take some huge working effort, and I would be pleased to help.

What are your opinions? Let´s make drupal.org newbie friendly?

-- Alexandre Ataide

Robert, Neo, and Ataide,
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. If there is an unofficial agreement that Drupal will be lean, and Civicspace will be the loaded up version, that works for me. Off to research the taxonomy add-on modules.

ae2005