Tips: How to use Taxonomy to classify your pages in Drupal

Taxonomy is not a common word to hear in the English language, so chances are if you haven’t dedicated your life to studying the mating habits of African dung beetles or tinkering with Drupal then you may not have even heard the word before. Taxonomy refers to a system of classification used to group similar items. In Drupal Taxonomy is used to group your pages by the subject matter or by other criteria so that they can later be sorted into page listings (using the Views module) or manipulated in some other fashion.

To find the Taxonomy administration page in Drupal 6 go to the navigation menu and click on “Content Management” then under that click on “Taxonomy”. In Drupal 5 the link for Taxonomy says “Categories” instead (which was confusing for some people). For both Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 you can get to the same page by entering admin/content/taxonomy after the domain name for your site.

In addition to the word “Taxonomy” There are a couple of other terms that need to be differentiated in order to fully understand Drupal Taxonomy.

Vocabulary: Vocabularies in Drupal are like containers, or folders which hold groups of related terms, or groups of terms that you want to use in particular areas of your site. If you have not created a vocabulary already you may have one vocabulary set up already for Forums.

Term: In Drupal terms are words that can be attached to pages by users or administrators. One thing that is important to understand about terms is that they can be changed as much as you want, but unless they are deleted they will retain connections to the pages they were attached to. So for instance if you create a term called “fat” and then change it to “skinny” later then all the pages that you labeled fat will now be labeled skinny. This is due to the fact that terms in Drupal are actually stored as numbers in the database. Those numbers are associated with the words that you create and edit, but since it is the numbers that are actually attached to the pages you can reorder and change your taxonomy to your heart’s content without worrying about breaking it.

Adding a Vocabulary to your Drupal Site

To get started if you don’t have any vocabularies yet, or if you only have a vocabulary for Forums go ahead and create a vocabulary by clicking the tab at the top of the taxonomy page that says “Add Vocabulary”. Give the vocabulary a name, “Department” could be a good one to use if your site was for a university for example. You can add a description if you want to; it isn’t necessary, but if you have others using the site it might be helpful. Help text is the text that will be shown to the user to help them chose a term; also not necessary but helpful. Then there is the content types section. The content types are the types of pages where you want this new classification system to appear. For some situations you may only want a vocabulary to appear on blog pages for example. Finally there are a set of options which determine how your new vocabulary will be displayed on the node edit pages. 

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Courtesy : Pixelclever.com