At long last, a group exists to discuss all things taxonomy, especially managing taxonomy. The clamor can subside!
Seriously, why hasn't taxonomy had a home on groups.drupal.org before now? What can we do to ensure taxonomy is used and developed to its potential?
A core feature regularly cited as one of Drupal's unique strengths, taxonomy has a wealth of contributed modules and could be poised to build ontologies for the (n)ever-coming Semantic Web.
Hardly sounds like a candidate for being tagged an underdog, but taxonomy can confuse users with its name alone and is arguably underused by administrators and developers. A generalized book module is set to be the default method for structuring sites. CCK introduces nodereferences and other modules also connect content in ways that bypass taxonomy. Is something lost when taxonomy isn't used to structure sites and relate content? Certainly taxonomy is powerful, complex, and has potential beyond even its current applications. What can be done to help taxonomy reach its best, highest use?
Matthias Hutterer and Benjamin Melançon are the initiating administrators for this group. The immediate motivation is our two summer of code projects, Taxonomy Manager and Community-Managed Taxonomy. This group will house updates on these modules, and any other taxonomy-related modules that choose to post.
But this group is also meant for wider discussion. Taxonomy Manager in particular will bring ease of use to administering taxonomies. What more can be done? What more should be done? What do you see as the good and bad aspects of taxonomy, what uses it can be put to, and what, if anything, can be done as administrators or developers to make the whole field of classifying things in Drupal better?
Comments
Taxonomy Support
Dear Benjamin,
One great reason for such a group is to help provide examples and further documentation to newcomers like myself who have trying questions.
I have been asked to setup a skills database in Drupal and need to compare 2 vocabularies in a pair, where multiple pairs would appear somehow using CCK, Usernode profile or some other method that might allow users to hold two vocabularies in a comparison, in a growable list.
For example, the user first selects the skill "accounting" and then selects their level of expertise "expert", and then do that again and again for each skill they want to rank.
Can you suggest how this might be done using Taxonomy and perhaps CCK or some other method?
Thanks!
Vocabularies for vocabularies: That's a tough question!
Hello freeburj,
Taxonomy totally should be able to do that, but what you're asking is actually pretty tough. In the broadest sense, taxonomy lets you set up an arbitrary set of terms for content, and you want to then apply an arbitrary set of terms to those terms that apply to content.
That's pretty awesome and I'm not sure even the taxonomy core (and basically unused) feature of related terms would do it. A linguist using Drupal for a site claimed that based on his investigation Drupal could do any taxonomy structure imaginable, so I'm going to assume I'm wrong here. Cross-vocabulary related terms should mean you don't have to create your own database tables to pair vocabularies with sets of terms, but I think you'll have to take
It's not difficult in principal to take over taxonomy's entry form to enforce more structure. I have a custom front end for the in-progress Place module's place_taxonomy component, taking over term weights to describe country, province/state, and city/town/village levels. (I still need to expose taxonomy weight to views in a custom way.)
If you're up for taking over the input and saving of term-node relationships, it shouldn't be too hard... oh, yes it would be. You can't use the related terms table, because the relationship depends on the content you are joined to. This would need a new database table: Term ID from one vocabulary, Term ID from the other vocabulary, and Node ID, with each row unique when all three are included.
Another approach would be to make each skill a node: make a node type called "Skill" that either must be authored by, or has a userreference to the user with the skill in question (you'll have to pick one, a form_alter could limit regular users to creating skills only for themselves) and has no body (unless you want a place for notes). Assign the content type both your vocabularies, skill and level of expertise, and require both. Then use node auto title to replace the title of the node with the user's name plus their skill, just to get the title out of the way. Then each user can have an arbitrary number of skills that belong to them, defined by skill name and level of expertise. Not sure how difficult it would be to allow the input of multiple skill nodes at once, if that workflow is important to you.
Anyone have other ideas, even (gasp) non-Taxonomy approaches?
~ ben melançon
member, Agaric Design Collective
http://AgaricDesign.com - "Open Source Free Software Web Development"
benjamin, agaric
I don't know that you want taxonomy or something else
What if each skill were a node type? The CCK field would be the User name and a polling feature to indicate the skill level or even another CCK field with a list of values?
Do you want a manager to also rate the person?
skill db, perhaps node_family, but how to cleanup the form?
Hi earnie,
We want each skill to be multilingual in 8 languages and at this stage there are 64 skills involved. What we hope for is a way to manage it all as well. Two vocabularies having parity in a node seem to be a good idea. I have been evaluating node_family to see if it can help and there is some hope there. What I am considering then is to setup a node type for 'usr_skill' and then give each user a limit of describing themselves by 30 skills (which you can do with node_family).
I am new to Drupal and my specialization is not php so this is where I call for help. I need each node for that type to be collapsed except for the two vocabulary drop-downs -- Skill and Level. I can probably configure something using page_router that will give me another blank entry form for the next skill/level after the first has been submitted. I can also use auto_nodetitles for listing the skill/level nodes on a page.
What I don't see a way to collape or even to hide the routine fields in a node so that only these two vocabularies are highlit. If you can see a way to make a nice UI for this on the user's profile, please let me know!
Most Grateful