Looking for a module that does: __ (Taxonomy of content/etc) - not quite a Wiki

Views can handle the linking you are talking about using Views with just a taxonomy parent relationships and a taxonomy name argument. The theme layout can be handled by Context module or Spaces for more functionality

My vote would be panels with term_view variants that pass context to a Views content pane display argument.

In a perfect world I think I'd have one terminology of "Countries" another "of States" and then another of "Cities"

I would then be able to make "Seattle" associated with the state "Washington" and the state with "United States" country.

Otherwise when you have a single nested taxonomy doesn't the field drop down list get super duper duper hairy trying to select?

Or in the content creation are can you somehow brake the various "Parent" selection/refinement into a sort of "steps"?

The other problem I'm having is even if I have a single taxonomy I can't seem to get a View configured to show me the list of Countries, then select one/see a list of the states/ then select one and see a list of cities, then select that and see the matching "Content Type" = City items (but I'd also potentially have some content type = state and show that on the top of the list?

It's very easy to create a taxonomy called Location with parent items of Country, subs of State/Region and sub-subs of City/Town.

It is very well known that trying to enforce sub-terms on node creation is a glaring Achilles Heal for Drupal.

So far, the only answers have been custom modules or (in this case) context.

In the case of custom modules, all the examples have used static content hard coded into "Samples".

As for context, that works great for controlling the visibility of an item based on the selection of another such as a check box or radio buttons. It fails if you have sub-items that are constantly added under parent items such as Cities under States.

I have yet to see a way to enforce primary and foreign key constraints in Drupal using the front end whether it be views, node reference, context or contextual administration.

I can do this very easily in asp.net. Why should it be so hard to implement it in my favorite CMS?

If I am missing anything, please let me know.

Perhaps this could be a topic at the next Sea_Dug?

From what i have been reading I think there may a solution if i understood correctly. I have been working on creating a craigslist style directory, that needed a dynamic hierarchy to displayed from a taxonomy or vocabulary in a similar manner depending on the current page or section.

I tried a number of modules, tax_menu, vocabulary, default views tax_term (with depth) and a bunch of others. They work great but failed to take a lot of use cases into consideration, such as if you want to list a specific item from level 2 of the hierarchy like with the above example:

-United States
--Washington
---Seattle
----Capital Hill
----Ballard

I could not just drop in a block or view to get the list from Seattle, downward to a certain depth. Also in some cases the parent category needed to be a link to that taxonomy term or plain html heading (h2,h3...)as well as a desired depth to go down in the taxonomy and a bunch of other options that were in the requirements.

In the end i had to write a module, and it seems like it is doing the trick. Now i can drop in custom taxonomies, from any level, with the option to output the parent as a title, as well as the children of that category. The joy is that you do not have to be limited to the root element of the taxonomy. So now i have a directory page listing that can look like this with multiple sub-categories, a vocabulary or term like this on the same page:

-United States
--Washington
---Seattle
----Capital Hill
----Ballard

-Canada
--British Colombia
---Victoria

-France
-- Paris
--- etc

Then on the various category pages it can then use arguments to filter so it is then dynamic on various pages. For example on the United States Section page and this approach. I created the lists as blocks so i could just use these as blocks and specify the paths it should display on:

--Texas
---Dallas
----Arlington
----Fort Worth
...
...
--Washington
---Seattle
----Capital Hill
----Ballard

This worked recursively so if there were 5 levels the admin will be able to specify the various depths to traverse. In the end i just used Drupal's default blocks (admin/build/block) and the module i wrote and it proved to work well enough for me. I have some additional functionality that i have to add to make sure it is complete but that's my 2 cents.