Beginning Drupal®

Chapter 8. Taxonomy

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Creating custom vocabularies

• Managing vocabulary terms

• Adding custom fields to your vocabulary

• Creating custom reports using your vocabulary

Newcomers to Drupal have found the taxonomy system to be one of the most intimidating and mysterious areas of Drupal. The word taxonomy was thought to be so confusing that it was renamed category in Drupal 5, but it was renamed back to taxonomy in Drupal 6 (and Drupal 7) because the mixture of words taxonomy and category was found to be even more confusing. Fortunately, this area is only intimidating because of its title and is neither complex nor confusing. If you've found yourself intimidated or confused by this area of Drupal in the past, take a deep breath, sit back, relax, and read this short chapter.

This chapter reviews Drupal's taxonomy system and provides examples of how you can make the most of this system to organize and categorize your site's content.

IN SIMPLE TERMS

In simple terms taxonomy is used to categorize your content. For example if you were writing a food related blog you could categorize a blog post with terms (tags) such as Middle Eastern, hummus, and pita, or Asian, noodles, and Peking-duck. Using terms will allow your site visitors to select all content relating to Middle Eastern food or for you to create an Asian food section.

TERMINOLOGY

Before diving into taxonomy, here are some words and their definitions:

• Taxonomy — The common definition of taxonomy is the practice ...