Drupal Taxonomy

The Taxonomy for a Drupal site is basically the system of classifying the information contained within. The Taxonomy can contain both a preset list of topic ideas or tags that users choose freely. The first step in building the taxonomy of your Drupal site involves choosing the vocabulary, or the main classification topic.

Vocabulary

A vocabulary can be the top level for other subcategories. For example, a vocabulary can be the term “colours” while all the subcategories, or terms, can be “red”, “blue”, and “yellow”. Further nesting of terms can be processed by using such subcategories under “red” as “red-orange”.

On the administration end, certain vocabularies and terms can be automatically associated with certain content types. If the administrator wants to require all content to contain a vocabulary, they will have to select the “Required” option. This makes the creation of content impossible without selecting a vocabulary.

Tagging

The option of free tagging is also possible with a Drupal website. Free tagging allows the user creating the content to select the vocabulary and terms for it at the time of creation.

Displaying

Terms in the taxonomy for the website can then be displayed in various ways, such as in a tag cloud. Other modules may allow you to use the information from the tags to navigate to other articles under the same ones. Defining terms for the taxonomy of a Drupal site adds depth and easier searchability.