[development] Taxonomy: Multiple parents?

Anton anton.list at gmail.com
Tue Jul 24 21:59:46 UTC 2007


On 24/07/07, Konstantin Käfer <kkaefer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the taxonomy.module provides a way to make term descendant to
> multiple independent terms (multiple parents). Does anyone use this
> kind of functionality, and what for?

We do, it's an important part of our site.

eg: http://ilign.com/categories/50,39/all and http://ilign.com/categories/48

In the above knowledge base, the "subject" vocab uses multiple parents
- eg the "budgets" term has parent terms "financial", "planning", and
"project". And the "risks" term has "project" and "business alignment"
parents.

The other "audience" and "purpose" vocabs are just simpler hierarchies though.

I can sympathise with the extra hassle that having multiple parents
causes - getting my taxonomy_filter contrib module (the menu you see
on the right sidebar of the above urls) to play handle them was more
effort than I hoped, but it was worth it.

The ability of Drupal to handle that sort of categorisation was the
main reason we chose Drupal in the first place. Allowing the same term
to be used in multiple contexts is useful and powerful.

Maybe I'm not fully aware of alternative methods but I would hate to
see multiple parents disappear from Drupals taxonomy system.

-- 
Cheers
Anton (styro at drupal.org)


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