Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 4 ■ Taxonomy
“individual sports.” Under team sports you might see football, basketball, baseball, hockey, volleyball, and
other team sports. Under individual sports, you might see golf, swimming, track and field, and motor sports.
You could continue to build out the hierarchy of sports until you have a representation of every sport on the
planet. As an author writing an article about a sporting event, I could choose one or more predefined terms
to categorize my article.
A big benefit of structured taxonomy over simplified tagging is the ability to select articles by individual
terms, or by categories of terms. In the previous example, you could look for articles specifically about
football, or you could take a more generalized approach and look for all articles within the category of
team sports.
Determining whether to use tagging or structured taxonomy is a matter of deciding how ridged you
want the categorization of content to appear on your site. And the great news is that you can use both
approaches simultaneously to provide authors with a high level of flexibility.
Let’s take a look at a real-world example. Let’s say we are creating a website that is focused on sports
news. Our targeted audience is people who like to follow what is happening with their favorite teams. If we
think about how people might want to search and navigate content on our site, we might think of organizing
the content by the type of sport, for example:
• Football
• Baseball
• Basketball
• Hockey
• Soccer
People may also want to find sports news by team:
• Ravens
• Trailblazers
• Lakers
• Raiders
• Yankees
In this example we would follow our previous example and create a structured taxonomy. We would
first create a vocabulary, which is the highest level in a hierarchical structure. For this example we would
create a vocabulary called “type of sport.” The terms that we would create within that vocabulary are
football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer. We would then create a second level in our hierarchy
where we assign the terms for the team names; for example, beneath the term football we would assign the
terms Ravens and Raiders. Beneath the term basketball we would assign the terms Trailblazers and Lakers.
Beneath the baseball term we would assign the term Yankees. We could continue adding team names until
every team in every sport is assigned to their appropriate spot. For the purposes of our demonstration, we’ll
stick with the simplified list.
Creating Vocabularies
The first step in using taxonomy is to identify and create the vocabularies that you will use to categorize
content on your website. Depending on the focus of your site and the breadth of subjects that you cover,
you may only need a single vocabulary or you may need several vocabularies. There isn’t a “correct” answer,
nor is there a formula that you can use to determine how many vocabularies your site will need. The best
36