I am working on a website that ultimately will be available in several languages. It is also going to have a lot of complex CCK content types.
A lot of these fields will be CCK options fields, such as checkboxes, radio buttons and so on. Many of these fields will be usable for filtering and creating lists as well. Some of these options will be added to as the site grows.
What I have been thinking about is the best way to implement this to be flexible, efficient and at the same time make it easy to maintain and translations.
As I see it I have two options:
- Use Content Taxonomy and put fields needed for filtering and referencing between content types in the taxonomy and the rest as normal CCK fields.
- Use Content Taxonomy and put everything that needs to be added to and/or translated in taxonomy.
I tend to lean at option 2 as I see it as the easiest way to both maintain the terms/options and translate them. However, I have a few concerns and questions to all you experts out there.
- How will this affect performance?
- What is most efficient, CCK or Taxonomy?
- If I put everything in taxonomy I will have to use Taxonomy Hide as well. Will this have any noticeable affect on performance?
- I would like to avoid having to translate more than once if I have for example several Yes/No fields in the content types. Is there any way I can refer those to a single Yes/No translation, sort of a token code for repeating words/phrases?
I would be grateful if someone that has any experience with this could give me some advices about which way to go.
/thomas
Comments
re: CCK fields or Taxonomy
I ask myself this question, "Will these same options be used with more than one content_type and have the same settings, such as required and allow multiple items?
Yes -use Taxonomy. No -use CCK field.
I am not experienced enough to answer your questions about performance differences between the two methods.
I think, the translation
I think, the translation options are not the most important decision drivers: You can easily translate CCK option fields and You can easily translate taxonomy term, too.
Although with taxonomy You have to carefully choose the vocabulary translation mode:
One experience that I had: if you have many terms (i have a site with around 500 terms in a vocabulary), forms can become very slow, if You are using Localize terms because, every term to be translated triggers a call to I18n_Strings() and therefore a SELECT statement... it really sucks -> see also http://drupal.org/node/776146
One decision driver might be the need to organize Your options hierarchically, which would be done best with taxonomy.
May someone could name more decision drivers ...