dwaine's sandbox: Taxonomy Term Node

The Drupal search mechanism is targeted at finding node content. In some use cases taxonomy descriptions contain content that is not indexed by the Drupal search mechanism. This tiny module allows a site builder to create nodes that contain as their content a single associated taxonomy description and therefore expose the content to the search mechanism.

The Encyclopedia of Puget Sound www.eopugetsound.org uses some taxonomy terms as 'overviews' with valuable descriptive content. This content was not being indexed by the Drupal search mechanism. We did not find an existing solution that indexed these term descriptions and returned them with all other search results. Our solution was to represent chosen terms as nodes.

The module creates a minimal node type that contains only two user configurable fields. The title can be manually set. If left blank, the module will use the Taxonomy term as the node title. The second field is a term reference field where the site builder chooses one taxonomy term to associate to the node and therefore expose the description field to the search index mechanism.

Although this code is not a perfect fix for exposing Taxonomy descriptions to the search mechanism it may be useful to others. It is not clear if enough other users would find this code useful to justify elevating it out of the 'sandbox' stage.