Drupal plays really well with taxonomy, leveraging it for many different use cases including Views, permission, workflows, search, filtering, and more. There are over 300 stable modules extending taxonomy functionality.
Here are a few of the basic recipes I suggest for getting the most out of taxonomy in Drupal
- Taxonomy management module is a must for a better UX when adding, removing, moving, relabeling terms. Note that not all the functionality of previous versions is supported in the 2.08 package which supports 9 and up (most critically, drag-and-drop hierarchy).
- Create a read-only view of the taxonomy. Even though Drupal provides fine-grained permissions, not everyone who needs to see the taxonomy will necessarily have an account (e.g. external content provider partners). Having a public view of your taxonomy also invites feedback and corrections.
- Create an internal view of content filterable by taxonomy fields with Views data export module enabled. This will let you conduct quick audits of content by term, download selections for SME review or other analysis (e.g. count how many items have how many terms to identify over or under tagging).
Other interesting/potentially useful modules (I hope to explore more in depth using this site as a test bed):
- Synonyms module -- this looks like it does a lot. I'm very interest to explore it further.
- Taxonomy unique -- this looks really useful to start introducing constraints needed for a formal taxonomy (i.e. each term can only occur once).
- Tooltip taxonomy -- I'm hoping this could be used during term selection for disambiguation and/or usage guidance (scope notes) as well as, optionally, for end-user guidance.
- Taxonomy max depth -- More constraints! I love constraints.
- Workflow -- with the addition of the "published" flag for taxonomy terms in core, it's possible to put terms through workflows and, potentially, maintain a list of candidate terms.
- Taxonomy bulk actions -- I'd like to see what this adds vs Views Bulk Actions and Taxonomy Manager
Stay tuned for more!