Taxonomy/site structure question

Or am I completely misunderstanding this? Is the whole point of the Category module to condense everything into a single hierarchy instead of letting you have multiple vocabularies or whatever they're called?

Yes, and no. In an ideal situation, category module would like you to define a single master hierarchy or root menu. However, it also lets you define multiple root menus.

Regarding multiple vocabularies (or containers), category module does not restrict you from creating them in any way. The real power of category module lies in the way you can define multiple parents for any category or container.

As you rightly guessed, you only need to create the book review (or more appropriately, since you have web site reviews also), a 'reviews' category once and give it multiple parents. At the moment, I haven't figured out how to get 'bookreview' or 'reviews' to appear under *all* the parent menus- by default, Category.module takes the distant parent with the lowest weight (or lowest alphabet, in the absence of weights) for listing the menu.

Also, I haven't figured out if the 'reviews' page will show a contextual listing of nodes (Web site reviews if under that parent, Movie reviews, if under that parent) or lump together all the nodes, as you have mentioned.

Apart from this, both categories and containers are actual nodes, which means you can do all the stuff that you can do with a node in drupal. This is a big improvement over drupal's default taxonomy, especially if you are using it for defining a hierarchical site structure.

For instance, try giving an introductory paragraph or image to the taxonomy term you want to use as the top level of a hierarchical section, a Table of Contents for vocabularies and <<prev next>> links between any containers anywhere in the hierarchy using default taxonomy module and you will see the power and flexibility that category.module brings. In sum, it gives you more power and flexibility than taxonomy, not less.

All of this from my rather limited understanding of the category.module. Hopefully, Jaza can fill in the gaps.

Is the whole point of the Category module to condense everything into a single hierarchy instead of letting you have multiple vocabularies or whatever they're called?

Most definitely not. In the category module, containers are the same as taxonomy vocabularies, and categories are the same as taxonomy terms. You can have multiple containers with category, just as you can have multiple vocabularies in taxonomy. you can assign categories from different containers to your articles using category, just as you can assign terms from different vocabularies to your articles using taxonomy. Your categories can have zero, one, or multiple parents, just as taxonomy terms can have zero, one, or multiple parents. All of this great flexibility that taxonomy offers, category also offers.

The difference is that it's possible to structure your categories and containers into one giant hierarchy, and yes, it's true that this is the main aim of the 'basic hybrid structure' tutorial, and is a common use for the category module in general. But you certainly don't have to put everything into one hierarchy. And even if you do - that is, even if your containers and categories are all together in one big 'tree' - they are still separate in terms of categorising content.

PS Ramdak: I think you covered pretty much everything already - nice work! I think what I'm saying here is pretty much repeating what you've already said. ;-)

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh