Taxonomy Garden: Taxonomy_defaults

Taxonomy_defaults
Purpose

This module automatically tags posts for which the taxonomy is not activated (in the categories admin section). For posts where the taxonomy is active, the tags are simply preselected.
UI

In admin/settings/taxonomy_defaults, a section is created for each content type. Each content type can set preselected tags in any vocabulary. For enabled vocabularies, the word "active" is not italicized. For non-enabled vocabularies, the word active is italicized. When entering a node, in-active vocabularies are not shown, but the term(s) are automatically added to nodes. For active vocabularies, the terms are pre-selected. In either case, the terms are visible when the node is rendered.
Pros

1. Simple and clean UI for adding default terms.
2. Easy way to automatically tag nodes passed on type. This is more powerful than just searching by node type because it can group arbitrary kinds of nodes (say, story and blog nodes are both automatically tagged as news).

Cons

1. The UI surrounding whether a vocab is active or not is unclear. Instead of changing the italics of a word, the word itself should change.
2. If this were moved to the category creation screen, it would be more useful.

Conclusion

This is an example of simple module that does a dedicated task well. The UI could use some minor tweaks, especially to help inexperienced admins understand what an "active" vocabulary means. This module is a great way for admins to force (through automatic tagging) or encourage (by having terms preselected) content creators to categorize terms.