Hi Andrew, I see what you mean about volume and issue. The only reason we want this is because we are actually going to publish the content in a printedmagazine once a week. Each community will have a specialized publication. Do you think we'll be able to pull the data based on the date and time instead? Do you know if you can copy a taxonomy and all it's terms to a new taxonomy with a new name? Also, I am still stuck on the problem of how to keep the content in the "Community" catagory organized in a "magazine" order. I think I can nail down this problem by using the taxonomy-browser as the primary interface to the content. Since I have over 60 terms, I figure we need maybe 3 or 4 primary catagories. My problem is that since I can not see what it looks like; I lost my eye site when I was 2; I am not sure of the best way to organize the interface for online viewing and also have the content in such a format that it is easily exported for lay out and printing. Before, I had all the content in one huge taxonomy which created like sixty options in the drop down menu of the taxonomy-browser. I decided to break it up in to a few taxonomies. What I have come up with so far is the following: The idea is to set it up like a newspaper. Catagory: Community News, Information, & Blogs Catagory: Local Business News, Information, and Blogs Catagory: Local Real Estate News, Information, and Blogs Catagory: Public Data and Records Catagory: Community Guides and Directories Catagory: Community Classifieds Catagory: Choose Your Community Catagory: Volume, Issue, and Date Catagory: Consortium Services and Products I originally had it all in three catagories: Catagory: News, Information, Blogs Catagory: Community: Catagory: Issue: Here is an example of what is under the "Primary Content" catagory Term: Community News & Information Under Terms: Citizen Blogs Community Commentary Community Events and Announcements Crime Watch Commics Art Galary - Artists Corner and Displays Public Poetry Music and Musicians Term: Business News and Information under Terms: Local Business News Sales and Marketing Roundtable Management Tips and stories Terms: Real Estate News & Information Under Terms: Real Estate Education Mortgage Information Property Insurance Information Terms: News and Information from Community Public records Under Terms: Real Estate Auctions Trusty & Estate Auctions Term: Community Services and Directories Under: Emergency, medical, and Government Resources Community Restaurant guide Community Yellow Pages - Business Directory Community Activity and Entertainment Guide Community Real Estate Listings and Sales Guide Community Lodging and Rentals Directory Term: Classifieds Under Term: Classifieds - General sales Classifieds Businesses For Sale Classifieds - Business for Lease Classifieds - commercial real estate for sale Any help would be greatly appreciated. Best Regards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Cohill" <cohill@designnine.com> To: <drupal-support@drupal.org> Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2005 6:21 AM Subject: Re: [drupal-support] Article Content and taxonomies
On Jun 9, 2005, at 4:02 AM, Christopher Taylor wrote:
I don't know if Flexinode will work because the content will be created by Citizens and Members. THey way not pay attention to volume and issue number per say.
If you have a relatively large group of untrained people creating content, in my experience you have to limit both the number of taxonomies and the number of items in each taxonomy. People don't like to have to figure out how to classify things, and often do it incorrectly or not at all, which defeats your plan.
remember that every node already has a date and time on it, so it may not be necessary to add that again.
I wonder if just two taxonomies would work.
One taxonomy would be a list of the communities.
The second taxonomy would be a list of topics.
This will allow you to categorize material according by community and by topic.
The Volume and Issue information will be of relatively low value, since I can promise almost no one will ever try to retrieve anything that way. No one will say, "I want to find an article in Volume Two, Issue 5." And really, that style of classification is an anachronism designed to help librarians retrieve physical books. It does not add much value when you have full text search capabilities.
Instead, they will say, "I want to find that article about growing apples in your backyard." And they will most likely use the full text search to find the article, not a taxonomy.
I call this the "big bucket, small bucket" problem. When developing a system, the designers often try to create a large number of small buckets on the theory that highly classified information is good, since many of us grew up with libraries, which have detailed classification systems. But those systems evolved in the absence of good search tools.
My preference is to start with a small number of large buckets, because there are fewer places to look for information. With many small buckets (multiple taxonomies with many items), users have to go from bucket to bucket, saying, in essence, "Is it in here? No. Is it in here? No. Is it in here? No.....and so on."
If your system is successful and gets lots of use, you can add additional taxonomies and categories as you see what is popular.
Best regards, Andrew ------------------------------------------------- Andrew Michael Cohill, Ph.D. Information architect
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