The Venture Skills Blog

Its been a short break but here is the third part in our Create a site like Digg with no programming series, the first two have been two of our most popular posts so hopefully this third one will be well received.

In part 1 we set up a basic site that mimics Digg, allowing users to submit stories and people to vote up an down the story, part 2 saw us expand this with a range of modules, taking the site in different directions. For part 3 we are going to discuss how to categories the site and develop a taxonomy system.

If you visit Digg or similar sites you will see that it is divided into categories, this helps to organize submissions and allows people to find information quickly. Drupal has a very powerful method of creating categories called taxonomies, which put simply provides a range of ways to classify your content.

The taxonomy module is one of the most popular features because users often want to create categories to organize content by type. Users also use categories to help in site navigation. The taxonomy module can automatically classify new content, which is very useful for organizing content on-the-fly. A simple example would be organizing a list of music reviews by musical genre.

Drupal handbook

The taxonomy module is by default in all version of Drupal 4.7 but might not be enabled, to enable it go to:

administer->modules and tick the enabled to the right of taxonomy module and save the configuration

once enabled it can be administered from:
administer -> categories from here you can create categories and sub categories.

The taxonomy module has its own vocabulary (forgive the pun) which should be explained before we begin.

• vocabulary - a grouping of categories
• terms - categories within the vocabulary
• free tagging - a method of allowing users to categories through folksonomies or tagging similar to del.icio.us tags

Lets create a simple category system, go to administer -> categories and add vocabulary
Start by giving your category group a name, I tend to use cat or tags try to keep it short you will see why in a minute. You can fill in the description and help text as you wish, under types choose weblinks and under hierarchical choose multiple and finally make it required.

You now have a base for your categories, the next things is to add categories in this case taxonomy module calls this terms.
to do this simply add terms, if you want to have hierarchical categories then choose the top levels first and add them to the root under parents, give the term a name and then save. Repeat for all your terms.

Thats it your done, no seriously you are done, go to create new content and add a new weblink you will see it has a list of categories. Once you have added a weblink to a category you have another way to see this via the term in the URL www.example.com/vocabulary/term so for example it could be www.example.com/cat/seo for example this would list all the weblinks in the category SEO.

Now this mimics Digg way to categories things but if you wanted to go down the del.icio.us method then when creating vocabulary choose free tagging, you will not need to add terms as the user adds them.

So thats it for categories, they automatically add rss to vocabulary lists.

Other Articles in this Series
Want to Create a Digg like site with no programming?
Create a site like Digg - Part 2

Other Articles on the Venture Skills Network about Drupal
HReview a CCK example using contemplate
5 Drupal Modules to Guarantee Drupal 5.0 Success
The Digg effect and can drupal survive it - looking at how drupal can cope with bandwidth spikes

Like what you see try these articles on the Venture Skills Network
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Information mining the social way - Using del.icio.us to mine your competitors
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