Lexicon

Lexicon description

A lexicon is a stock of terms used in a particular profession, subject or style; a vocabulary. The Lexicon module generates one or more Lexicon pages based on terms in taxonomies and optionally marks terms in the content and links them to the appropriate Lexicon page.

The Lexicon module started out as a fork of the Glossary module project that was changed to suit the needs of a project for the Dutch government and later ported to Drupal 7. The main reason for forking the Glossary module was compliancy with the web guidelines of the Dutch government.

Differences between Lexicon and Glossary module

The main differences with the Glossary module are that the Lexicon module:

• Produces output that is valid W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict.
• Enables showing lists of terms without marking the terms in content (this is still an option). You can choose which vocabularies act as Lexicons and you don’t bind them to input filters.
• Has configurable paths and titles for each Lexicon page.
• Optionally inserts a “go to top” link for each section on the Lexicon page.
• Optionally “scrolls” to internal links on the Lexicon page.
• Lexicon is also available for Drupal 7
• From the 7.x-1.4 version and up the Lexicon module uses template files instead of theme functions for output rendering

Drupal 6 versus Drupal 7 version

Shortly after Drupal 7.0 was released the Drupal 7 version of the Lexicon module was developed. From that moment new features only go into the Drupal 7 version unless there is lot of demand for a feature to be backported to the Drupal 6 version.

Related terms and synonyms for terms have been stripped out of the Taxonomy module in Drupal 7 and the functionality should now be created using Fields. The Drupal 7 version of the Lexicon module lets the administrator configure which fields of a vocabulary are used as fields for related terms, synonyms and/or term images.

For a comparison of glossary-style modules see this page.

Development of this module was sponsored by LimoenGroen, Amsterdam-based Drupal specialists.