[development] Early Drupal 6 review from Chris Messina

[Chris Johnson]

On Nov 11, 2007 1:12 AM, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:

> David Strauss schrieb:

> > butchers vocabularies and terms. It suggests calling both "categories,"
> > which would add a whole new level of ambiguity. It makes me want to
> > rename "Categories" to something like "Classification" just to avoid the
> > whole issue of expecting an interface to add categories.

> I never agreed to the renaming of Taxonomy to Categories in the first
> place. :p
>
> I think it was done in the light of a proposal, "Drupal is too
> complicated, let's dumb it down".
>
> > Maybe it would be valuable for Drupal to configure a vocabulary called
> > "Tags" out of the box with free tagging that's enabled for all content
> > types. But it should be clear that tagging is a *subset* of what the
> > taxonomy system can do.
>
> I think this suggestion would be good for a blogging installation profile.

Exactly.

I hated the whole taxonomy / vocabulary / terms terminology thing when
I first started with Drupal.  I hated it so much I went looked at
other CMSs and frameworks before I finally had to come back to Drupal
because none of the others were as extensible or coded as well.

So, I understand how hard it is to learn the Drupal taxonomy feature
by newcomers.  But now that I do understand it, I realize that calling
it just about anything else is misleading, and faulty
over-simplification.

Categories of content are simply one small subset of what Drupal
taxonomies can do.  Free tagging is another.  It makes much more sense
to provide profiles with those things enabled and described, than to
screw up the whole coherency of Drupal by renaming taxonomy to
something it really isn't.

Taxonomies may not be the easiest thing to understand, but we really
sell ourselves short to try and dumb them down.  Instead, we should
write better documentation (yes, I know how much coders love that) and
provide profiles for the sets of users not as interested in learning.

Of course, my own viewpoint is of Drupal as a CMS framework, as Ivan
Sergio Borgonovo so aptly put it earlier in this thread.  It's not a
blog and it's not a CMS, to me.  It's a development tool for building
CMS-like sites, social software, collaboration software, etc.  Others
may reasonably disagree.  :-)

..chrisxj