Best way to organize content? (Content Taxonomy vs Taxonomy)
Hey everyone. I'm trying to set up several taxonomies on my site so that the content can be easily filtered. I established two distinct vocabularies which will be cross-referenced for this purpose (Categories and Keywords - see examples below). I would like to have a central menu/set of drop-down lists that would filter my content. For example, once you're in the Blog area, you could filter by these two taxonomies, as well as sort by popularity/newest/etc, and end up with a url such as www.mysite.com/blogs/popular/graphic-design/web-media/flash/portraits. As you can see, I would like all the parent terms from one taxonomy to be present in the URL, but only the last term of the second one. This page would have a panel with a view that presents the results. I already figured out the sorting aspect (I'll create a separate view for each sorting option), but not the filtering part.
It seems like all this functionality would be based on the Views arguments. Content Taxonomy, from what I've seen, doesn't allow for hierarchy in arguments, so I believe I'll have to stick to regular Taxonomy. I still haven't quite figured out the pros of using Content Taxonomy. I've seen solutions such as http://groups.drupal.org/node/8500 , but they don't provide the SEO/user-friendly URL that I'm looking for. If anyone could help me figuring out the best way to implement this navigation menu, or suggest an alternative, I'd appreciate it a lot.
Categories (2 or 3 levels):
-Graphic Design
--Identity
--Print Media
--Web Media
---Flash
---Websites
--Other
-Illustration
...
Keywords (2 levels):
-People
--Portraits
--Self
...
I'm wondering if the Apache
I'm wondering if the Apache Solr search engine could be an option. So far it depends on filter blocks, but in http://drupal.org/node/425986 they seem to be developing a patch for a dropdown form filter mechanism. I'm worried that this approach might be overkill though, and would not produce the SEO/User-friendly URL's i'm looking for.
Exposed filters?
So, as I understand it, you want to create two dropdown lists of taxonomy terms for site visitors to navigate your blog? If so, have you tried using exposed filters in Views? If not, just use (or create) the default view for your blog. Then add two further filters, one for each set of taxonomy terms, but this time hitting the "Expose" button as you do so. This exposes terms as a dropdown list above the default view.
Unfortunately, I don't know how, or even if, you can make exposed filters produce clean URLs (see http://drupal.org/node/362326). But does that matter if the rest of the site uses clean URLs?
Are you using Pathauto? That, along with Token, will allow you to set clean, search engine-friendly URLs for your default taxonomy paths -- perhaps not exactly the paths that you describe, but I wonder whether you're trying to be too elaborate with your paths? Personally, I think URLs should be human-friendly as well as SEF, and there are other ways to improve SEO.
Apart from Views exposed filters, have you tried any of the specialized modules that can add various methods of navigation via taxonomy? Check out the taxonomy modules section and the taxonomy modules documation section.