Drupal Taxonomy Part 2

The previous article covered an overview of Drupal's Taxonomy. This one walks through actual usage examples.

A quick recap of taxonomy:

Let's look at usage examples using articles I've created.

Taxonomy in Practice

Let's see what happens when labels are attached to articles and used for sorting.

The articles on my site broadly fall into two themes:

1. A personal record of building a website while learning Drupal > Creation
2. Articles on fashion and vintage clothing > Life Style

A term called Creation and a term called Life Style are configured for these two themes respectively.

When writing a Life Style article, the Life Style content type is selected and the article is written. Before publishing, Life Style is selected in the Tags field.

The configured terms appear as links at the bottom of the page. Clicking a link shows a list of all articles assigned the same term. That's the basic use of taxonomy.

Giving articles taxonomy elements and displaying the assigned terms lets taxonomy function as what's generally called a tag. As covered in the previous article, the basic concept of tags is that they have no hierarchy. A tag cloud — the kind you often see on blogs, listing all tags in one place — is a feature that displays registered tags from a separate field on a separate page.

My own approach to site building is to keep categories small since it's a small site, so I don't use fine-grained tags in large numbers — meaning there's no current need for a tag cloud. But as articles accumulate, it could help readers find what they're looking for, so I'll consider adding one when the time comes.

The word "tag" is used, but the function is to place article-related labels on the page so that articles sharing the same label can be listed and displayed together. The typical purpose is to surface related articles for readers, or to organize keywords that don't quite warrant a full category.

Placing configured terms as a list in a menu gives taxonomy category-like functionality. On my site, the top navigation includes a navigation menu where categories can be selected.

The same taxonomy element is used both as a tag feature for finding related articles from within an article, and as a category list for browsing by category from the menu. "All articles" uses Views, but the content matches what the taxonomy link would show. Using the taxonomy display result for the menu list would also work, but there are a few advantages to using Views. I'll cover that in a separate article.

Beyond the typical tag and category uses, here are some other ways to put taxonomy to work.

3-1. Shop Introduction Pages

One way I'm using taxonomy is for shop introduction pages.

A Shop vocabulary is configured in articles, with individual shops used as terms. As mentioned in the previous article, the taxonomy display results can have fields freely configured — by default, a description field is provided before the list view, and it supports HTML. I use this field to add information about the shop, while the articles about items purchased there are displayed in the list view below.

One advantage of this approach is that articles about items purchased at a shop are automatically added to that shop's page. The same result could be achieved with Views or Block layout, but those would add more items to manage. Setting a shop as a term in taxonomy handles both the shop introduction and the related articles in one step, making it more efficient to maintain.

I haven't found a solution yet, but I've been trying to use terms within terms — managing the shop list itself as terms — and not getting the result I expected. Thinking through the fundamentals, it makes sense: the basic premise of taxonomy is labels for content, so a term with no content associated with it can't display. I understand that much.

Not covered in this article, but taxonomy display is also managed through Views. I want to take a closer look at that configuration at some point. Views filtering conditions are generally based on constants, but taxonomy-related Views use variables as their basis — understanding that distinction might be where the solution lies.

3-2. Latest Articles on the Top Page

Drupal's default feature for displaying articles and pages on the top page only lets you toggle each page's visibility — it doesn't support automatically displaying the three most recent articles per theme in descending order. That kind of configuration is achievable by combining taxonomy, Views, and Block layout. It requires configuration across multiple features, but it lets you display the right information in the right place in the right form.

Three latest articles from each of the two themes are displayed. These latest article blocks are created in Views using taxonomy as the extraction condition and filtering by vocabulary, then placed on the top page through Block layout.

Conclude.

Drupal's Taxonomy has been covered across two articles. Compared to other features, the configuration and usage are relatively straightforward, which makes it versatile. Since its purpose isn't fixed, thinking through how to use it opens up a wide range of applications.

At its core, it's a feature for attaching labels to articles and pages and using those labels in various ways — and it's the foundational feature for thinking through where and how to display individual articles and pages across the site.

I often talk about Drupal's underlying concepts, and taxonomy is no exception — it's built around vocabulary > term. I also often mention that one of Drupal's characteristics is its separation of configuration from use, and that applies here too: fields and other settings are configured at the vocabulary level, while actual use happens through terms.

This means terms can be given page-like elements, making it easy to use them in ways that go beyond typical taxonomy use cases. Creating and managing shop introduction pages through taxonomy — as introduced here — isn't something I'd naturally think to do in other CMSes, but it's an idea that came from working with Drupal's configuration-versus-use separation and looking carefully at what's configurable.

As I often mention in other articles, the need to configure across multiple features comes with a correspondingly high degree of freedom and versatility — and that's one of Drupal's strengths. Writing these taxonomy articles, it's clear that combining taxonomy with Views and Block layout opens up even more possibilities.

The next article will cover Views.