Drupal Taxonomy

Here at LMMRtech we are fairly new to Drupal, the CMS. In the past we have worked with Typo3, Mambo/Joomla, and even a small CMS we developed in-house. Drupal is very different. It puts content first and foremost.

This approach is one of the great strengths of Drupal. It is also, perhaps, its most confusing feature.

For example. Think of a simple "brochure" website.  A few static pages, perhaps arranged in a heirarchy. Although this can be done in Drupal it is nowhere near as easy as it would be in other sites. Because most CMS packages think in terms of pages  and folders. A simple site is just the default folder and some pages in it. Great for a tiny little site. But quickly the limitations show when sites get large. Folder help a lot but they fail too because it is hard to have one page in several folders.

In Drupal you have kinds of pages (forums, book, blog,...) and, once you have enabled the taxonomy module, keywords associated with those pages .

For example if I had a site discussing films I could  have a heirarchy of keywords a small part of which could be:
    Genre
     Romantic
       Comedy
       Sci-Fi
       Action, ...
     Sci-Fi
      Romantic
      Action, ...
   Cast
     Actors
     Actresses

Drupal calls the collection of keywords (in red above) a vocabulary. Create each vocabulary  using:
    administer/categories menu
not sure why it isn't called the taxonomy menu or even the vocabulary menu, but there you go!

Drupal calls each keyword inside the vocabulary (in blue above) a term.

So rather than a heirachy of pages and folders like a conventional CMS, Drupal has a heirachy of vocabularies and terms.
Why is this important? Because in most complex sites people are interested in what the data is not where it is! Drupal thinks in those terms.

Drupal also allows a two terms to be stapled together. In the above example a you could make Romatic Sci-Fi and Sci-Fi Romantic equivalent.

If you are looking for a Romantic Comedy  you would want to find all pages tagged as being about either. It wouldn't matter if they were part of a forum, a book, or a blog! Once you have found relevant articles you would probably want to quickly see other related pages. All these activities are independant of any concept of folders and this is why Drupal wins.

For more notes look at following document that comes with Drupal: /admin/help/taxonomy a copy of which can be found here.