How to use Taxonomies in Drupal

As the world's leading provider of taxonomies, WAND's role is to evangelize and raise awareness about where taxonomies can actually be used.  Today we'll talk about Drupal. Drupal is one of the most popular open source content management systems, used to power websites, e-commerce sites, and portals.

Drupal has built in taxonomy support as well as a robust ecosystem of add-on modules that can enhance the experience of using taxonomy.  Taxonomy is a Core module in Drupal which means it is included as part of the Drupal Project Download.

Taxonomy is important in Drupal for three primary reasons:

     1) Taxonomy in Drupal can be used as a framework for overall site navigation.

     2) Taxonomy in Drupal can be used as a set of tags that can be applied to content. Content that has been well-tagged with a curated taxonomy is easier to search and reuse across a website.

     3) Creating synonyms within your taxonomy ensures that content is tagged in a consistent manner regardless of the words people want to use for a concept.  H.R. = Human Resources.

In essence, taxonomy provides the basic foundation for a Drupal site's information architecture

From Drupal.org:

"Taxonomy can be used in workflow, to customize defined sections of your website with different themes or to display specific content based on taxonomy terms."

If you've decided to deploy taxonomies in your Drupal site, the WAND Taxonomy Library Portal will give you access to pre-defined taxonomies covering nearly every industry and every business topic.  Taxonomies can be downloaded in a format that will easily import directly into Drupal

I've gathered some additional resources directly from Drupal.org that goes into greater detail on how to take advantage of taxonomy to make the content on your Drupal site more accessible for your users.

       Documentation for how to use Taxonomies in Drupal:

Organizing Content With Taxonomies: https://www.drupal.org/documentation/modules/taxonomy
About Taxonomies:  https://www.drupal.org/node/774892

       Add-on modules to enhance the basic taxonomy capabilities of Drupal:

https://www.drupal.org/node/206734

https://www.drupal.org/project/taxonomy_csv

https://www.drupal.org/project/taxonomy_manager