Comments on: Question – Taxonomy & Categories

By: J-P Stacey

J-P Stacey — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:50:06 +0000

I don’t see it as necessarily evidence of a deficiency (although using the same system for both registering page callbacks and for your site’s breadcrumbs and left-hand navigation has clearly reached the limit of usefulness). I see it more as a vote of confidence in categorisation.

Drupal’s categorisation is already flexible and powerful, even though elements such as synonyms are arguably unfairly neglected. Using potentially different vocabularies, but the same engine, all over the place makes perfect sense for me: for content types, site structure, even modules (precisely why are modules categorised using keywords in the .info files?)

I wouldn’t want to *force* all categorisation into using core taxonomy. What’s important is for their implementation to feel natural for the user. But if that UX can sit on top of a tried and tested system then all the better.

By: Laura Norvig

Laura Norvig — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:17:38 +0000

I see a common thread in some of these comments where taxonomy is used as a bit of a hack for, as you say, site structure, and, as someone else said, grouping content types.

These are interesting uses and seem to reflect deficiencies in menus and in the ways content types can be leveraged.

By: EvanDonovan

EvanDonovan — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:52:34 +0000

Three major ways:

1) To relate content together so that Views (+ Panels) and Faceted Search can generate custom lists
1b) A major subapplication of this is that we export the data from Location.module to Taxonomy so that it can be used to make maps for a specific city or country (via Gmap Views)
2) To make custom homepages/landing pages (through assigning a taxonomy term to the posts that should be featured on each)
3) SEO: freetagging terms on each node are links to actual indexable pages

By: JirkaRybka

JirkaRybka — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:54:19 +0000

Categories are used on our website, so that users put their posts (of certain types) into fitting (both!) topic- and geography-based sections themselves. Unlike the approach of putting nodes into menus (which have limitations), node authors may do this themselves, the selection may be required and for more independent hiearchies simultaneously, and we also allow multiple selection as the content fits. That’s the positive side. Negative is, that having a good navigation into these sections (=terms) is virtually impossible. We need something what looks like browsing directories in a filesystem (very natural way for every computer user), so that readers may walk the hiearchy tree from root to the section of interest, without having to use search engine or other funny ways to “break in” to the needed term’s page. Our content is of permanent value, so “latest posts” kind of navigation is often not fitting. Core have no page for a vocabulary, which is a serious gap in the navigation from root even if the whole tree of links was hand-made. (D.O. Issue #185146). After evaluating several Taxonomy based contributed modules, none of which gave the needed functionality, we finally dumped Taxonomy in favor of the Category module. Category, despite all it’s bugs and questionable aspects, offers nearly flawless navigation, plus other improvements, such as fully-blown introduction texts (=node bodies) for categories (node listings). Also having category-based breadcrumb on nodes (without putting all nodes into a menu) is a notorious problem of Drupal.

By: Rowan Price

Rowan Price — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:22:08 +0000

To follow up on comments by Greg and tdskate, I’m creating vocabularies in advance so that I can present logged-in website users with the content that is most useful to them, based on their stated or assumed interests (stored in their profile).

This is sometimes happening when profiles are synched with 3rd party CRM profile data.

By: eric

eric — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:06:47 +0000

“Categorizing normal content and categorizing products should somehow be different.”

Well, it can be different: create a different taxonomy and assign it to your “product” content types. Product listings, as I see it, are the kind of thing that the current taxonomy implementation actually does rather well.

It’s when you want to create a site that has a designed IA that taxonomy stops being useful, in my experience.

By: Waxstrong

Waxstrong — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:47:30 +0000

Categorize, tag, and flag content.

By: eric

eric — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:37:15 +0000

Using taxonomy to define site architecture is a non-starter for the kinds of sites that we build. There’s effectively no useful integration with the menu system, so you can’t use it to place pages on navigation, and the kind of pages you get if you rely on Taxonomy to produce your site IA are just wholly inappropriate for marketing sites. You just don’t have enough control over the presentation, at least not at the “Verity” (or, arguably, even the “Jeremy”) level.

Right now, I’m only using Taxonomy to make things show up in views. I don’t find it useful for anything else in a corporate setting, because the idea of automatically organizing a site by taxonomy is just simply opaque to most users and is totally inappropriate for a site where you’re trying to communicate a coherent message. (A.k.a. a “marketing” or site.)

Put another way: Organizing a site by taxonomy in Drupal is not easy. Takes a lot of work. Organizing it by menus is easy. It’s the default. Taxonomy and menus at this point are basically not integrated in any way that’s very useful out of the box.

By: Paddy de Búrca

Paddy de Búrca — Sat, 16 May 2009 10:43:30 +0000

I mainly use taxonomies to group related content together.

When (re)designing I look at content that already exists to see if it already falls into separate containers, and I look at
the objectives of the web site and try to categories how the web site will be used to communicate with the stakeholders.

I generally use a mind mapping tool, such as freemind, to design the taxonomies – either flat or hierarchical. With freemind, I can tag containers where content already exists. I try to make sense of the taxonomy, (re)moving those containers that “don’t really belong” and after trimming and pruning, I am left with my final taxonomy.

By: xqbzzr

xqbzzr — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:59:30 +0000

In the beginning i had difficulties in understanding the concept behind taxonomy, not at last because its not called category. But with more experience i did understand, why it is not called category because it can be used in so many different ways. And i learned to use and love the concept behind it.
Sometimes i just use it to flag content with icons. Doing that requires the taxonomy image module, but works so well!
Although i never use the free tagging or synonyms, i am glad that i had the option to.
So i think the use of taxonomy is uncounted, perhaps the basic explanation should receive a little rework.