Taxonomies in Drupal - The Daily Drupal, 22 July 2009

Today's Daily Drupal is about the Taxonomy Module and working with taxonomies or structured vocabularies in Drupal. Now, admittedly, this is a subject close to my heart, me being a librarian and all - I love me some thesauri, structured vocabularies and metadata standards! Again, we're in our 3rd month using Drupal and are just starting to get into the real configuration and development in order to migrate roughly 70 websites into a single codebase, multi-site install of Drupal. (see here)

We plan to have several taxonomies of varying degrees of specificity on our flagship site and some basic topical and hierarchical ones used across our affiliate sites. For reference, I'm beginning by re-reading the basic overview of using taxonomies in Drupal beginning on page 59 of O'Reilly's Using Drupal book, a book I highly recommend if you're new to Drupal, as well as the documentation on drupal.org here. According to drupal.org:

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. Taxonomy is a method of organizing content on a site. For example classifying music by genre could generate this list: classical, jazz, rock. A single area such as "classical" might be further classified as concertos, sonatas, symphonies, and so on.

Of the three types of vocabularies that Drupal supports...

• simple list of terms
• organized hierarchies of terms
• free tagging

... we only plan to use the first 2. It is possible that we will allow free tagging in a future password-protected, intranet environment but not on our sites now, as a rule. So, I'm beginning with a very simple, high-level "master" taxonomy for organizing our content prior to content migration later this year. In addition, we will have a "news" taxonomy as well as an "archiving" taxonomy.

One of the issues we are facing is the balance between employing Drupal's "content types" in conjunction with or possibly instead of a taxonomy. For example, should a podcast be a content type "podcast" and then be tagged using one of our taxonomies, or should it be simply a page or story in the system and then be tagged with taxonomy term "podcast" in some kind of structured vocabulary. We are opting for the former, but I think an argument could be made for the latter, depending on the context of the information.

In general, we're going to try to keep our "content types" to a minimum and employ taxonomies plus the Views Module to present content and create rich RSS feeds, etc.

See also:

• Taxonomy presentation from Drupalcamp Colorado
• More about Taxonomy
• Drupal taxonomy tutorial

This has been the Daily Drupal for 21 July 2009. To subscribe to The Daily Drupal, a week-daily column about Drupal from the perspective of a new Drupal user, use this feed.