On 9/8/07, paola.dimaio@gmail.com paola.dimaio@gmail.com wrote:

Okay, my latest question about to ensure 'uniqueness of values' was unanswered This could be because it was (again) an unclear question (apologies if thats the case) Or because nobody knows the answer. This is a case of having hit a limitation of the current module, or simply not knowing how to use it

I believe it was for both reasons. Because of the way you used the term "category" and because it can't be done in the particular way you conceived.

Let me try again. same module (taxonomy) I need to find out a clever way to structure our 'categories' and 'tags' in a way that they can be be combined

categories = terms = tags vocabulary is the containing entity

I think this can be done by creating a hierarchy of vocabularies/categories

so what I wonder is can I make a category become the parent or child of another category? at the moment I dont see this option (I can see that I can make a term become the child or parent of another term, but what I need is a group of terms to be the parent of another group of terms)

The way the system is designed, there is no direct way to create a hierarchy of vocabularies. You could of course create a "meta-vocabulary" containing your vocabularies as categories, but that would be hardly useful. Neither tagging nor listing would be possible without custom code. Categories are designed for tagging and listing nodes, and categories are not nodes..

So, I would suggest looking for a solution which does not need a hierarchy of vocabularies.

The reason why I need this, its because the drop down menus at the moment are toooo long. For each term, I have say 10 child terms, which in turn have 10 child terms so its very difficult to select the right one(s) cause one gets lost before finding the right category Plus I cannot selectively make one term mandatory, say a parent, and the children optional (for those who may want to have more granular keywords)

You will need to design for effective tagging and user convenience based on the available methods. For example:

Case 1: A very badly designed vocabulary. Allows errors and is cumbersome.

Tags (vocabulary) ------------------------ Sections -- Section 1 -- Section 2 Topics -- Topic 1 -- ... -- Topic 1000

Applies to all content types. Mandatory, mutiple select

Case 2: A somehow better design

Sections (vocabulary) ----------------- Section 1 Section 2

Applies to all content types Mandatory, single select

Topic 1 (vocabulary) ------------- -- Subtopic 1 -- .... -- Subtopic 10

Applies only to content type "topic1" Mandatory, single or multiple select

Topic 2 (vocabulary) ------------- -- Subtopic 1 -- .... -- Subtopic 10

Applies only to content type "topic2" Mandatory, single or multiple select

Now, the user will have 2 manageable category selection lists. The second one will be shorter and different based on the content type.

Or else, you could create different content types for each section, so that you can use the taxonomy_defaults module (http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_defaults) to assign a specified section category to each so that the user won't see a second selection list.

Notice that content types are not only for adding different fields. They are also used for workflow (different publishing options and different associated vocabularies). So, you can use that to move some of the users' burden to yourself (having to manage 20 content types vs. having the users manage 1000 terms in an error-prone way).

So one way of doing that (perhaps) would be for each parent term have a new 'category', so that each parent term can be made mandatory (hence creating a superstructure) and then making one or more children optional, and then linking a freeflowing tags to that. Has someone implemented a nice complex hierarchy using taxonomy module and has advice ?

thanks

-- Paola Di Maio School of IT www.mfu.ac.th

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