Taxonomy provide a way to classify your site’s content. Taxonomy vocabularies are created with terms within those vocabularies. Then reference fields can be added to content types or other entity bundles so that content can be individually categorized.
For example, on the Drupalize.Me website, we have a vocabulary called Categories with terms for each category of content we have, i.e., Site Building, Theming, Module Development, Site Administration, and Backend and Infrastructure. We then add a reference field on each content type, like blog and tutorials. This enables us to “tag” each blog post or tutorial with the appropriate category.
Example tasks
- Set up a taxonomy to categorize your site’s content
- Access taxonomy entity data in a module
Confidence
The process of using Drupal’s administrative UI to create vocabularies, terms, adding taxonomy fields, and tagging content with taxonomy terms is essentially the same process in Drupal 7 as in Drupal 8. However, the developer experience of accessing taxonomy-related data in a module has changed due to Drupal’s object-oriented architecture and also its emphasis on practically everything being an “entity.” Thus, instead of taxonomy-specific functions, taxonomy data is accessed programmatically via the Entity API. See the Entity topic for more information.
Drupalize.Me resources
Overview of reference fields and their commonly-used types.
Overview of taxonomy and how it can be used to categorize content in a website.
How to create a taxonomy vocabulary and add it as a field to a content type.
How to add a reference field that connects two content types.
Content Modeling
TopicContent modeling consists of identifying and constructing the different building blocks of data that compose the information on your site.
For developers
Taxonomy uses Drupal’s Entity API.
Drupal 7
In this chapter we talk about Drupal's taxonomy system, which is a way to organize our content. We'll walk through the steps to create a new vocabulary, add some terms, and then use it with our Press Release content type.
External resources
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Organizing content with taxonomies (Drupal.org)
- Some questions to help you determine how you may want to use taxonomy.