Posted by texas-bronius on March 10, 2010 at 9:27pm
All my years, I've been fighting Drupal Taxonomy. It's convenient and powerful, but I just haven't got the kind of grasp of it that I can use it effectively. I use it in my own kludgey ways but usually remove the terms bit from node.tpl.php to avoid unfederated browsing. Better, however, would be to embrace taxonomy browsing and learn to theme it better to suit my needs.
Can anyone share a similar journey (on through to a successful, satisfying end) to help guide me there?
Comments
Don't use it much
It's good for what it's good for. It's an important part of virtually every Drupal ecommerce site we do, but used for almost nothing else.
For things like galleries or article classification, I wobble between taxonomy and custom cck fields.
What are you hoping to get from it? I've not found it terribly complex for most tasks, but then maybe I just haven't come across the right task. I just can't think of a use case for which I'd find it an indispensable tool.
Knowing the tables underlying the module makes it a bit easier for me to work with.
Again, nothing specific comes
Again, nothing specific comes to mind, but in general, let's say I have some image galleries of nodes categorized by some 7 main categories (one vocab) and a keyword tagging vocab. When I build my view, I use term/name as the argument, and keywords are exposed as a filter within.
Should a person ever get to "view a node" by itself, they will by default see all values for both vocabs (or any others, too) under the title. One click of a tax term, and wham, the visitor is off in taxonomyville, surfing all kinds strange collections of unformatted node teasers in unintended ways.
Yeah, same general feeling about that
One of the things about taxonomy use that bugs me is that simply ignoring that those indexes exist (ie not linking to them) doesn't mean they won't get visited by someone with Drupal knowledge or an aggressive search indexer. Which means that just by their use, you are being 'taxed' with extra work. On the one hand, you get these category indexes and tagging tools for free; On the other hand, you have to custom theme (and manage permissions for) each of them. If I'm going to go to the work of theming the indexes, I'd rather just do the whole shebang and come up with a more directed and cohesive experience.
I think that those taxonomy indexes are meant to "make hard things possible" for those without the time, inclination or skill to do otherwise. But maybe that's just me being snooty.
some thoughts: Taxonomy can
some thoughts:
Taxonomy can be an incredibly powerful ally once you've learned how to make friends with it. The ability to create complex hierarchies, synonyms, etc can be awesome. That said, using cck instead is also perfectly valid for certain use cases.
You might check out http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_redirect for your "taxonomy ville" concerns, and also find video of a presentation from DrupalCon about sustainable theming. I'll post a link to one when I get a chance to look for it. Essentially the idea is if you have themed your nodes logically from the start, you should avoid weird looking pages (including taxonomy pages) down the road, and anything you add to your site later should look just fine even though it hasn't been themed individually.
The video:
The video: http://www.archive.org/details/SustainablethemingHowtotakeavacation
The slides: http://www.slideshare.net/caroltron/sustainable-theming
What might be useful is an overview
We might dedicate each meeting to the discussion of an aspect of drupal development/deployment/design. In this case ... the taxonomy system from top to bottom. Three 15 minute sessions from three perspectives.
Acquia Seminar
http://acquia.com/resources/webinars/cck-and-taxonomy-striking-balance-y...
Mayhaps of interest?
Be aware that these things are 60% marketing for acquia, 40% useful information. Not that there's (emunications.com) anything (emunications.com) wrong (emunications.com) with (emunications.com) that (emunications.com).