Taxonomy vs Node reference
We are in a debate as to whether we should use taxonomy or node reference!
Our website enables selling of Products, especially for Schools and Colleges. Users can create products or purchase products on the site. The Products have some categories associated with it.
Has a tree structure, root, L1, L2,L3. Parts of the categories are repetitive.
eg. Books
-- Education
---Physics
---- Grade I
---- Grade II
---- Grade III
---Chemistry
---- Grade I
---- Grade II
---- Grade III
---Biology
---- Grade I
---- Grade II
---- Grade III
-- Fiction
Musical Instruments
--Guitar
--- Electric
--- non Elelctric
--Drums
Games
Is it good to use one Vocabulary to define the tree, one to define the Grade or Class(single) , one for the city...
OR should we go in for Node reference? Use Node reference to create the tree?
My feeling was to go in for OPTION I taxonomy. Taxonomy has so many features enabled along with it. Will get better search enabled and SEO enabled. The Querries will also be more efficient.
Are we in the right direction, should be go ahead with using Taxonomy!
Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/
How would you envision using Node Reference?
Although I'm a big fan of architectures that use Node Reference and often find Taxonomy to be overused, I think it this case Taxonomy is the right choice.
However, maybe I don't understand. How would use envision using Node Reference?
-Mike Schinkel
http://mikeschinkel.com/
(P.S. Be sure to notify me at mikeschinkel [aht] gmail of your reply. God I wish drupal.org had email notifications.)
Notifications
They've been on this site since day 1: http://groups.drupal.org/groups/my -- you can set up notifications on a group by group basis.
And, on your personal sites, you can use the subscriptions module (and I think there a newer module as well, IIRC, Messaging Framework).
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
You can define a node type
You can define a node type for each category -type (or vocabulary) you want to create. Establish the next tree level by Creating another CCk and node referencing the parent.... DO I make sense?
Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/
Why?
Yeah, you could do that, but why?
I'd create different vocabularies for grades, subjects etc. if I were the OP. That way your users have more display options like 'everything from grade x' or 'everything about this subject' and there is less redundancy that way (you don't need to have grade items for every subject, you can just specificy them once in the other vocabulary).
Node Hierarchy
I would use Node Hierarchy (http://drupal.org/project/nodehierarchy) for this problem. In my experience, pushing Taxonomy to the point where it needs to support menus, parent-child relationships, etc. gets to a point where it's very cumbersome. You can do it, but it starts to hurt after a while.
Node Reference could also work, but that also feels like you're pushing it to a place it wasn't designed for.
Node Hierarchy, on the other hand, was designed for this sort of problem. There are some other modules in the same space as NH that may also be worth looking at: node relativity (http://drupal.org/project/relativity) and node family (http://drupal.org/project/nodefamily). This discussion may be worth looking through as well: http://drupal.org/node/189583.
Drew Gorton
Gorton Studios