More updates and Taxonomy 101 ;)

Found and fixed default content creation permissions for authenticated users. They will be able to add content that will need to be approved.. (i.e. moderated posts). Blogs and forum posts are not moderated.

Read up and added some basic terms for the taxonomy module. I am yet to streamline the heirarchies properly, and am trying to figure out a few things before I do so. Primary among them is a way of restricting access to certain terms in a vocabulary to certain roles.

However considering how little "layman" literature (Most comprehensive articles I've read on the subject seem to enjoy talking about it in terms of Set Theory :S) there is on the web, let me post what I believe is an easy way to understand and get the taxonomy module underway..

• Taxonomy == Classification == Categorisation == Dividing your site into various sections so that you can link your pages/posts with various sections, thus making them easier to find/list.
• More jargon: Vocabulary, terms, related terms, synonyms. Out of these four, you can safely erase "synonyms" and "related terms" from your brain. Synonyms are used only in the glossary module, which you are very likely not using. Related Terms is something that is apparently not used in any mainstream situation. Therefore, the only words you need to worry about are "Vocabulary" and "Term".
• Now, say for e.g. your users are heavy bloggers. While they are writing their blog, you want to give them the ability to tell the world what kind of emotion the post represents - i.e. a happy post, a sad post, an embarrasing post etc. What you would do is create a line just above the post that says "Mood : " and have a drop down selector with the options "Happy/Sad/Embarrasing..". In this example, "Mood" is the name of the "vocabulary", and "Happy", "Sad", "Embarrasing" etc. are the "terms" of the vocabulary.
• Since the "Mood" vocabulary is something that you will most likely use only when you are blogging, you can associate it only with the blog module of your site. You can similary create other vocabularies for other modules like the story or forum or page modules. A vocabulary can be connected to more than one module if need be. So your mood vocabulary could just as easily also be connected to the forum module. So when a member makes a "happy" forum post, he can set the mood of the post to "happy". When you search the site for all "happy" posts, you will find stuff from users' blogs as well as stuff from the fora.
• Similarly, you could give users who post stories the option to classify their story based on the topic. So, create a vocabulary named "Topic" and add terms like "Movies", "Music", "Video games" etc. so that they can classify their story under a relevant topic.
• You can have nested terms too. So under the "Movies" term, you could have terms like "Action", "Romance", "Comedy", "Science Fiction" etc. You can also allow the user to select multiple terms when he adds his story. For e.g. if a user is writing a review of a Jackie Chan movie, he might want to classify it under both "Action" and "Comedy". Later if another user searches for "Action" movies, this Jackie Chan flick will pop up. And if yet another user searches for "Comedy" flicks, this movie will again come up, which is the whole idea ;)
• You can also have two vocabularies for the same module. For e.g. you could have the "Topic" vocabulary and the "Mood" vocabulary for the blog module. So if a user blogs about a funny movie he just saw that he really enjoyed, he could classify that blog under the "Topic" - "Action" (Movie) and under the "Mood" - "Happy".
• These are just practical uses of the vocabulary system for the average CMS, but the taxonomy module can be used for classifying pretty much anything. They can be used in other modules besides those that are related to the standard content modules. For e.g. a family tree module could be set up to use the taxonomy module to classify your family tree and so on..
• A mainstream example of the taxonomy module put into interesting use can be seen at this site dedicated to bugs!

Well, I hope that made sense to you :P
Cheers
-K