[drupal-support] Article Content and taxonomies

[Andrew Cohill]

On Jun 8, 2005, at 9:55 AM, Christopher Taylor wrote:
>  
> 3. Taxonomy, Issue
> Term:
> Volume 1, Issue 1, Beginning 06-02-2005
> Term: Volume 2, Issue 2, Beginning 06-06-2005
>

putting structured information like this into a taxonomy is not always 
the most efficient approach.  One problem is that the taxonomy will 
grow without limit.

There is also an interface design issue.  People do very poorly 
navigating and use long lists of items.  While there are occasionally 
good reasons to create long taxonomy sets,  it is something I usually 
try to avoid.

Since you do have well-structured information, another approach would 
be to use flexinode and create a new node type with several data 
fields, including a Volume data field (for the Volume number), Issue 
data field, date data field, and so on.  You would, of course, also 
create a text area field that will hold the article.

For each node, you would also classify it according to one or more of 
the other taxonomies you have.

Also keep in mind that Drupal's full text search capability is your 
friend.  People are very familiar with search engines like Google, and 
are relatively unfamiliar with searching by rigid classification 
schemes, in which you have to understand the classification scheme to 
make good use of it.

If most people can find most things they will want to search for using 
full text search, that's probably good enough.

Andrew

-------------------------------------------------
Andrew Michael Cohill, Ph.D.
Information architect

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