Taxonomy

Wikipedia says that taxonomy comes from the Greek words taxis = order and nomos = law.

So a taxonomy is _only_ a grouping of similar concepts or words.

a direct quote from Wikipedia "Taxonomies are frequently hierarchical in structure. However taxonomy may also refer to relationship schemes other than hierarchies, such as network structures. Other taxonomies may include single children with multi-parents, for example, "Car" might appear with both parents "Vehicle" and "Steel Mechanisms". A taxonomy might also be a simple organization of objects into groups, or even an alphabetical list."

So a taxonomy _could_ be

  Home Page
  Photo Galleries
  +- Holidays
      +- Honeymoon
      +- United States
          +- Grand Canyon
  +- The Family
  +- The House
  Contact
  +- The Brussels Office
       +- Favourite drink
           +- Beer
  +- The London Office
      +- Favourite drink
          +- Coffee
  Nutrition
  +- Food
      +- Bread
      +- Meat
          +- Beef
          +- Poultry
      +- Beverages
          +- Beer
          +- Coffee

As you can see this example is all over the place. To build a taxonomy for your site you need to figure out what will go on your site; the relationship between them and then devise a simple tree-like structure that shows the relationship between these elements.

You can choose from

• a simple flat structure where there are just children and no grand-children
• a multi-level structure where there is a one-to-n relationship between parent and children - in the above example both beer and coffee apprears twice - these could be separate taxonomy terms with the same name
• a multi-level structure where there is an n-to-n relationship between parents and children - in the above example both beer and coffee appears twice - these would then be the same taxonomy term.

Taxonomy can be as simple or as complicated as you may need. My advice would be to start off simple, gain experience, categorise your content and further build and develop your taxonomy.

Paddy.

http://deburca.org, and http://amadain.net

If absolutely all you want to do is create a tree-type menu system, then the taxonomy system is probably more than you need.

You may just be better off creating the pages that you want (as nodes of type 'page'), and then using the menu module to organise your pages into a tree. This will create the proper navigation links in a side block for you, and will generate corresponding breadcrumbs. If you want taxonomy terms to be part of this menu tree, you can use the menu module to work with them just like you can with nodes.

You can also use the book module to organise the nodes of your site into a tree. The book module will add some extra features for you, like a list of sub-pages (i.e. a 'table of contents') on each page, and 'previous' and 'next' links so you can crawl your site's tree. However, only nodes can be included in a book hierarchy (not taxonomy terms, which are not nodes).

Taxonomy is designed to be used for categorising (or tagging) content (think flickr tags), whereas the book module (and the menu module) are for structuring content (into a tree). Many people find this distinction confusing, and this is one reason why I wrote my proposal to merge the taxonomy and book modules.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh