[support] Taxonomy and Group Containers

[Michael Angeles]

I think the method you should use for creating taxonomies depends on how you
want to extract or display that information and on how much effort you want
to expend on maintaining it. The Views module seems like it will give you
most of the flexibility you need for creating rules for displaying content.
But what you want to consider is whether or not the structure you are
creating will require you to maintain the views. For instance, given your
example, say you start with the following structure in your Politics
Taxonomy:

Countries
. Afghanistan
<http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0107264.html>. Algeria
. Andorra
. Angola
Groups
. Al-Qaeda
. Amnesty International

You can create a *Countries* View and select each country in the taxonomy
filter. But I don't believe there is a way to just say "give me every
descendent of the Countries term and show that in my view. If there is a way
to do that with Views, I'd love to see it. So you have to select the terms
in the select field. But if you want to add Albania to that list of
countries, what I think you need to do to update the view is go back to the
views filter and now select Albania as well.

In the past, I've worked around this by creating separate taxonomies for
each facet I use. See the taxonomies in use on my blog for instance:
http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/sitemap I've used that separation to break up
the display of my metadata below each entry so I can show terms broken up by
taxonomy, e.g. Subject, People, File format. Works for that display need.
But you'll notice that I also added some complexity by using hierarchy
within some of the taxonomies, e.g. Subjects and People. Taking the People
example, if I wanted a view that only showed Groups of people rather than
individuals, I'd run into the same problem you would have in your Politics
taxonomy of having to manually update the Views filter again.

I've gotten to the point where I am starting to use and love the free
tagging capabilities of Taxonomy. This change in behavior of tagging as you
go conflicts with my previous behavior of adding terms to the hierarchical
taxonomies because as I add free tags, they end up in the root of the
Subject Taxonomy, requiring me to still go back and file each term I add
under a parent for that hierarchy to continue to make sense. And because the
Taxonomy module doesn't presently provide a way to filter terms in the admin
view, e.g. to find the term I just added without paging through the list,
this task has become cumbersome as a after-the-fact activity. Tricky issue,
because I'm at a point where I could decide to dump the hierarchy because of
the level of effort it requires to maintain. Doing this kind of hierarchical
taxonomy management on a blog is probably unheard of, but in certain
applications is warranted.

So, this may not be an answer to your question, but rather is a cautionary
tale about how being very descriptive and maintaining relationships within
one hierarchy can leave you with maintenance concerns as you scale up. In
terms of ease of entry, creating facets within one taxonomy which will make
it easier to select terms when you are creating new content and doing free
tagging using one field in Drupal. But organizationally speaking, I wonder
if that approach presents you with some challenging display and maintenance
issues.

-Michael

On 9/24/06, Salman Al-Rahma <smhar at gawab.com> wrote:
>
> I am using the taxonomy module and have several vocabularies added
> ,several look like this: 'Politics' which has Single Hierarchy and
> Multiple select, and has several Terms such as 'Countries', 'Groups',
> 'Ideas', and Item such as countries has 'sub' Items such as 'USA',
> 'England',  'Germany' etc. Now.. whenever I post a new article or blog
> entry and tag it, say.. USA, I still need to tag Countries and Politics
> as well or otherwise when clicking Countries it will show an empty list.
> Is this the right practice to do? or am I doing something wrong? am I
> using the right module for the job?
>
> --
> Knowledge is Power
> ----------------------
> http://www.mishkah.org
>
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> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
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