Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.
By tevih on
Hey all!
I have a little question about the best way list taxonomies. I'm only just starting to use them, and I'm trying to wrap my brain around it.
My question is how to label taxonomies. I'm going to use a newspaper as an example. Say we have the following hierarchical list:
Front Page
- headlines
- at a glance
Entertainment
- music
- movies
- dining
Business
- markets
- small business
- personal finance
In the above example, I would like the label "Front Page," "Entertainment," and "Business" as "Main Sections" and the smaller categories as "Features." I'm confused how to do that, though. I feel like I'm missing something fundamental in the way taxonomies should be created...
Comments
A very breif note, taxonomy
A very breif note, taxonomy is used to categorize nodes with Terms. So in your example above this is what it appears you are trying to do:
You can create a content type called Entertainment. Then create another content type called Business. Each one of these content types can have it's own taxonomy which provides a list of categories each o e of these nodes should fall under.
This is just one approach, but do keep in mind that Taxonomy is used to categorize nodes by terms.
I think you're mixing up
I think you're mixing up taxonomy and structure a little bit. Maybe it helps to imagine how you would 'tag' or categorize a piece of content. While it makes sense to have a story in the 'small business' category, you probably would not tag a story as 'headlines' or 'features' — these terms do nothing to describe the content or how it relates to other similar pieces of content. Instead you would probably have a 'features' block that would pull in the five most popular 'Business' stories, for example.
Thanks guys; I think I
Thanks guys; I think I understand what you're saying. I think I am mixing up structure and tagging... I think what I'm trying to do I need views? For example, selecting all the sections and then labeling them in the view as "Sections:"...?
I think I'm getting it. It's just a new concept for me. Thanks!
But now I'm confused about hierarchical taxonomy. I'm gonna keep reading and experimenting about this.
Lets try and walk through a
Lets try and walk through a very simple example that shows how taxonomy could be used. We are going to pretend that we are making a dating website. A place that people can go to add interests, goals, characteristics, etc about themselves so that other people can find them in hopes of making a match or connection based on similar interests.
Step one. We are definitely going to want to use a module that creates nodes for for user profiles. We want these to be nodes so that we can associate taxonomy to this node type. When a user is adding or editing their profile information, they are in fact editing their profile node which is going to show a few taxonomy items that we are going to create.
One taxonomy that would most likely be useful would be a "Personality" taxonomy. It would probably be set to allow people to free tag (or add their own tags separated by commas. This is because there are a ton of different words that could categorize a person's personality which would take way to long for you to have to figure out and type up. By adding this taxonomy, you will then be able to pull all nodes that have been tagged as "Outgoing", or "Shy". Notice how we are simply categorizing (using taxonomy) nodes together based on common terms?
Next, we could created a taxonomy for Interests. Again, this would most likely be a free tagging taxonomy as their are tons and tons of possibilities. This taxonomy would also be assigned to the users profile node which they would have access to when they where editing their profile. So now you can get really creative. "Get me all profiles that have a personality of Extremist with a Interest in Sky Diving and Mountain Climbing". You can because you've categorized these profile nodes with taxonomy terms which allows for easy grouping!
I hope this breaks down more why you would use taxonomy and how it is generally used. Just to spread your concepts on it, take a gaming site for example. You could create a "Game Node" which is a content type "game" that gets created when your adding a new game to your website. Well, is that an Adventure Game? Or an Action Game? You could create a taxonomy that holds all of these Game Type Terms and then tag your game nodes to them! Now you could pull related games when viewing a game node based on its taxonomy.
Cheers
My 2¢ worth...
Your list isn't too far off except that I'd say you're mixing topic and presentation. I'd look at having:
1. A taxonomy for topic, which could cover Entertainment and its sub-categories, as well as Business and its sub-categories. A very comprehensive example is the IPTC Topics taxonomy which is commonly used in the news industry - see http://iptc.cms.apa.at/std/topicset/topicset.iptc-subjectcode.xml (very big XML file).
2. Some other means of deciding where and how content is presented. For example, the front page could be a view which pulls in the most recent story from each of the topics listed above. The index pages for each section could be a view which pulls all of the stories from each of the topics listed above.
Hope this makes sense...