In working with taxonomy, I'm now leaning toward the following as a replacement for term_node (I'm using words here for readability, but assume all "id" columns are, in fact, numbers): tid | uid | type | id ----------------------------- cat | morbus | image | 67 cat | moshe | node | 17 dog | killes | comment | 129 cool | dries | user | 1 which would also satisfy node/899 as well. But, my work with librarian tech and the LibDB project (now halted) has resurfaced because of the above. The "type / id" mentality was used in LibDB's relationship table, but was expanded to include a generic two way relationship. I'd like to bounce the same idea for Drupal core and see what you think. Here is the table structure and example data (again, assume that if an ID makes sense in the column, it'd be there, and that "f" is "from", "r" is "relationship" and "t" is "to"). I've include explanatory sentences under each column: f_type | f_data | r_type | r_data | r_who | t_type | t_data ------------------------------------------------------------ term | cat | taxo | | morb | image | 67 "taxonomy relationship between term cat and image 67, by morbus" term | dog | taxo | | moshe | node | 17 "taxonomy relationship between term dog and node 17, by moshe user | morb | user | friend | moshe | user | dries "user relationship: moshe asserts that user morbus is a friend of user dries" user | jonbob | user | lover | morb | user | dries "user relationship: morbus asserts that user jonbob is a lover of user dries" user | walkah | rating | 6 | walkah | node | 16 user | morbus | rating | 10 | morbus | user | dries "user walkah has given node 16 a rating of 6" "user morbus has given user dries a rating of 10" And so on and so forth. In essence: * anything can relate to anything else. * the types of relationship are defined by the module. * relationships may have additional data (rating, "friend"). The above is pretty powerful (but at what cost - who knows a lot about gigantic tables - is the lookup insanely bad?), and is flexible enough to handle a lot of features that would normally require overhauling existing tables or creating new ones entirely. Two recent modules I've seen, for example, serve the following purpose: * different URLs use different templates (sections module, I think). * nodes can be in a child/parent rel (node_relativity, I think). I'm assuming they both do this magic with new tables. But, what about: url | /forums | sections | | morbus | template | happy.tpl node | 16 | relativity | child | morbus | node | 19 node | 18 | relativity | inspired | morbus | node | 25 And so on. -- Morbus Iff ( you, me, eropuri? aawwwwwWWWw yYeahahhHHAhhh ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus