Sample K-12 Taxonomy

Drupal Ed is really for building a website that will be community driven and where you expect students and teachers to posting a lot of their own content. At least that's how I see it. If what you are building is a district website, you can probably safely do it without Drupal Ed.

In any case, Drupal Ed is just a distribution of modules and settings, so you could add some of the features of it yourself over time.

As for 'building your php in', I highly suggest doing this through custom Drupal modules, and taking the time to learn how to build Drupal modules yourself. I found the "Pro Drupal Development" book very helpful for this, although by the time I had bought the book I was fairly experienced at building Drupal modules and found this book to be a useful reference for the tasks one doesn't do all the time (like building custom nodes, etc...).

As for your second question about the taxonomy, it really depends on what you want to use it for. I could see a subject/grade driven taxonomy as useful, or a topic driven taxonomy. Could you elaborate more on what you see the purpose of your website being?

Dave

I teach at a small 6-12 school, and this is what we currently use for taxonomies:

• Topic: virtually all content types use this vocabulary including (Announcements, Calendar item, Event, Image, Page, School Record, News and Wishlist). s you might expect, this vocabulary contains a lot of terms. All of them are children of a single "lincoln lutheran" topic that serves as the catchall topic for things that don't have terms (yet?). Most of them are pretty obvious, but here are the top level terms:
  1. Student Life: Things that students do that are not academic or activity related, these tend to be social things like prom, homecoming ans so on.
  2. AcademicsEach department has a term, some departments have subterms (English has a 'writers corner') Graduation and Scholarships live here as well.
  3. ActivitiesContains all of our activities and the subterm athletics which contains all sports. The hierarchy is important, because it lets us specify some news/announcements are Athletics and have that content appear on the pages for all of the sports teams (Music has a similar hierarchy). A typical sport will have a layout like this:
     • Basketball
       • Boys Basketball
         • High School Boys Basketball
         • Middle School Boys Basketball
       • Girls Basketball
         • High School Girls Basketball
         • Middle School Girls Basketball

     Using the full names turned out to be important (rather than saying "basketball -> boys -> high school") because we want the full name when people see (and maybe click on) the topics. Coaches told me it would not be useful at our school to differentiate Varsity and JV teams, or Middle School "A", "B" and "C" teams. I imagine it would be at a larger school.

  4. Admissions: We are a private school, so this contains a fair amount of content.
  5. Alumni: Content about alumni, not necessarily all content addressed to alumni
  6. Friends: The term they wanted for development
  7. Staff: About the staff
  8. Church Life: We are a parochial school, and frequently have news about the churches that our students attend.
  9. Local Interest: Things that teachers want to highlight that are not strictly school related. Blood drives or whatever.
• Event: This vocabulary is only used for calendar items, and lets us easily display different types of calendars. These terms are pretty self explanatory, so I'll just list them: Holiday, School Year, Lunch Menu, Event, Competition, Due Date, Meeting and Practice. Event and competition are separate, because we list results for competitions
• Audience::This one hasn't worked out quite the way I planned. I was going to use it to differentiate what we show people based on who they are with terms like "general public", "current families" and so on. I don't think I would implement this if I was going to start over. The only thing we use it for now is pulling out content that alumni might be interested in. If you're interested, you can read how I thought we'd use this on the handbook page.

I too would be very interested in hearing what other people do.

Mark,

Was just doing some research on reference taxonomy for k-12 -- the link you provided two years ago no longer works. Do you still have that page up somewhere?

Thanks, -Joe