By magnestyuk on

Hi,
i'm planning on migrating my website to drupal and i have installed drupal cvs on my local apache server to get to know how drupal works and experiment with it. at first i thought i understood the concept of taxonomy, but not any more. my problems are:

1. can i create a hierarchical vocabulary and use its first degree terms as only placeholders for their respective child terms into which i will submit stories? in this scenario, when i click on a link such as taxonomy/page/or/1 all the nodes "filed" under that particular child term get listed, but when on this page i click on the link taxonomy/view/or/3 (the "empty" parent term above the node title) the resulting page does not list the nodes belonging to the empty term's child term(s). am i supposed to associate a node with not only the immediate term that i want it to belong to but also its parent terms? or am i missing something?

2. i'm using xtempate, and when in a node page (e.g. node/view/2, which belongs to a child term under an "empty" parent term), no breadcrumbs show, only "home." am i doing something wrong?

3. with basic installation, that is, current cvs, can i make (some of) my vocabularies show up on the navigation menu? is this process supposed to be automatic if i set up my taxonomies the "right way"?

i did searches on this, but i couldn't find answers. if my questions are unclear, that shows just how much i don't get it.:)
could someone help clear this up for me?
thanks,
Szilvi

Comments

Brian@brianpuccio.net’s picture

Brian@brianpuccio.net commented

I think you do understand, just expect something slightly different.

  1. If I understand you correctly, you have a similar setup as one of my sites. You have higher container terms which are empty and serve only to hold other taxonomy terms. When you click the child term, you see the nodes under that child. That is what you expect and what you get. But when you click on the container term, you don't get any results. Correct?

    I think the issue here is that you expect a click on a term to return all nodes filed under that term and all subterms. This just isn't the design of taxonomy. I can think of a few situations where you would not want to see nodes filed under subterms when clicking on a term and this is probably what the taxonomy programmers had in mind.

    On the flip side, I can also think of a few examples when I would want to include all subterms. One of these days (read: a few months from now) I plan on making my own modified version of the taxonomy html module that will have a plus sign, or other special character, next to the term, and clicking on that would return nodes in the container term as well as the subterm.

  2. Do you mean the breadcrumbs at the top? On my sites, that doesn't reflect taxonomy, but rather something like home >> adminstration >> stats or home >> blogs >> Brian. I believe there is a taxonomy breadcrumb moduel of some sort, but I hven't even looked at it. Are you using this?

  3. On 4.3.x, there was a few taxonomy modules that intergrated into the navigation, each in their own different ways. I can't help here as I haven't even begun working on my 4.4rc/CVS site's navigation. You can always add links through the theme at the top and bottom of each page, or just write your own custom block and toss some HTML in, but that's kludging it together by hand, a module would be a better solution, but like i said, I haven't even gotten that far yet.

Sorry I can't be of more help!

magnestyuk’s picture

magnestyuk commented

thanks very much, this is already a big help!


If I understand you correctly, you have a similar setup as one of my sites. You have higher container terms which are empty and serve only to hold other taxonomy terms. When you click the child term, you see the nodes under that child. That is what you expect and what you get. But when you click on the container term, you don't get any results. Correct?

correct. thanks for clearing this up. i'm relieved that it was not me.

with regard to breadcrumbs, i mean the trail that says where i am in the taxonomy hierarchy. when i view a node page, i cannot see any trail, only "home." i would expect to find there the parent term(s) of the term to which my current node belongs, as e.g. in the drupal site, when you're looking at a forum entry, the breadcrumb says Home > Forums > Support etc.
is this the supposed behavior/function of breadcrumbs?
does it make use of taxonomy this way?

Brian@brianpuccio.net’s picture

Brian@brianpuccio.net commented

AFAIK, the breadcrumbs do not make use of taxonomy, which is why the breadcrumbs follow you into the adminstration section and such. The forum sections are based on taxonomy, so I guess in a way, the navigation breadcrumbs are based on taxonomy when you are in the forums, but else where, taxonomy doesn't have anything to do with the breadcrumbs. Look at my old site and click on one of the terms to the left. The breadcrumb stays the same, home >> blogs >> brian. You might want to look into taxonomy context.

magnestyuk’s picture

magnestyuk commented

thanks, taxonomy context looks like what i need.

still, i don't quite get if and why forum (and blog?) nodes automatically get breadcrumbs and other kinds of nodes don't, except when used with a module like taxonomy context.

i think i seriously need some clarification of how hierarchical navigation is dependent on/related to hierarchical taxonomies/vocabs, plus whether i can set up a navigation menu based on taxonomy without additional (=not included in core install) modules. and of course, breadcrumbs. are they innate to current drupal cvs install, and on what content pages should i expect to find them and where should i expect not to find them.

Brian@brianpuccio.net’s picture

Brian@brianpuccio.net commented

Take a look at my old site again, but go into the gallery section. Notice how the breadcrumbs there are different than else where. This leads me to believe breadcrumbs are a function of the module (in the gallery case, image.module).

You will need an additional module for the navigation menu, unless you wish to create a custom block and type the HTML yourself for each catefgory/term. To me, this is not worth the time as the taxonomy can and probably will constantly change. You would than have to edit existing links, delete others, and create even more. Bad Idea(tm).

Taxonomy is part of the Drupal core, but you will need some sort additional module to navigate through your site based on taxonomy.

Helmar’s picture

Helmar commented

Check this thread: http://drupal.org/node/view/8317

Jeremy’s picture

Jeremy commented

> 1. can i create a hierarchical vocabulary and use its first degree
> terms as only placeholders for their respective child terms into which
> i will submit stories? in this scenario, when i click on a link such
> as taxonomy/page/or/1 all the nodes "filed" under that particular
> child term get listed, but when on this page i click on the link
> taxonomy/view/or/3 (the "empty" parent term above the node title) the > resulting page does not list the nodes belonging to the empty term's
> child term(s).

I have provided that functionality here.

With the patch applied, you could get the above functionality by going to:
taxonomy/children/or/1

magnestyuk’s picture

magnestyuk commented

thanks for the great support!

briandburnham’s picture

briandburnham commented

I have encountered the same shortcoming as is mentioned above in 1.

Taxonomy needs an "inherit child term's nodes" option. Taxonomy's excuse for its cryptic setup is flexibility, and this issue is a major point of inflexibility.

JonBob’s picture

JonBob commented

This has already been filed as a feature request, and is awaiting testing and feedback.

In the meantime, you might try taxonomy_menu.module, which allows this sort of taxonomy browsing. The CVS version addresses the breadcrumb issue as well using some new post-4.4 APIs.