When displaying the terms for a node, it would be desirable in some contexts to have a vocabulary-specific list instead of the default list of all matching terms.

For example, consider a posting that represents a farm, categorized by (a) products produced, (b) farming practices, (c) location, etc. By default, it would display as follows:

Submitted by Tracy Brock on Mon, 06/14/2004 - 22:20.
beans | certified organic | corn | Fruits and Berries | gooseberries | Grainery | herbs | Nanaimo | Pacific Agricultural Certifcation Society (PACS) | peas | Producers | raspberries | rye | vegetables, various

But it would be useful to be able to separate out the different vocabularies, to see at a glance, for instance, products produced, as follows:

Farming Practices

Location

Membership

Products

Resource Type

The attached patch introduces a new vocabulary setting, link_display, to allow site admins to select either the default display of terms for a node ("top") or, if prefered, a vocabulary-specific breakout in the body of the node display ("body"). It's implemented using the _nodeapi() "view" option. Also included are patches for the database.mysql and database.pgsql files to introduce a new field into the vocabulary table.

CommentFileSizeAuthor
taxonomy-select-link-list-type-patch.zip2.76 KBnedjo

Comments

nedjo’s picture

nedjo
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commented

No response as yet, so I'll try to do a better job of explaining the advantages of this patch!

While it's most used for simple sections of a website, the taxonomy system enables rich relational database functionality. For any data type, it can track multiple "one-to-many" or "many-to-many" relationships. For example, using no more than the existing taxonomy system, it would be possible to track, for a company node type, multiple products, customers, projects, and staff (each of these being a separate vocabulary).

The current way of displaying linked terms for a node - lumping them together in an alphabetical list with no indication of what vocabulary they are from - makes sense for the "sections of a website" use, but doesn't take full advantage of the taxonomy system's ability to provide multiple categorizations. For the company example, it would be preferable to separate out, e.g., products as a distinct listing.

This patch doesn't replace the existing way of displaying categories. Rather, it provides an option--to designate specific vocabularies to display instead in a list form. This functionality would help to take fuller advantage of the powerful and flexible taxonomy system.

dries’s picture

dries commented

Maybe provide some screenshots to illustrate the proposed changes/additions?

Bèr Kessels’s picture

Bèr Kessels commented

Bump. This still lloks interesting but is old and does no longer apply. Should it be updated or closed?

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

The patch does not apply anymore.

I also disagree with adding a setting for this. IMHO, the terms should always be retrieved sorted per vocab and the theme should decide how to present them.

nedjo’s picture

nedjo
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Thanks for the suggestion, killes, leaving presentation to themes does sound good. To do so, we could pass to the, e.g., theme_taxononomy_links() function an array of vocabulary objects (the vocabularies with matching terms), each with its own array of term objects (having $term->tid and $term->name properties). Does this sound like a good approach?

The only potential disadvantage I see in this approach versus the one I outlined is that it wouldn't enable distinct behaviours for different vocabularies (some display as undifferenciated links, others as inline lists sorted by vocabulary), but this functionality isn't essential.

nedjo’s picture

nedjo
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commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

I'm working on a way of implementing this thorugh the taxonomy_context module.