Using taxonomies to organize/filter Products, Services, etc...

[Scott Prentice <sp@leximation.com>]

Hi...

I've been looking at how to use taxonomies to allow for the custom 
display of these special lists we want to maintain. It looks like it 
should work, although I think we will have to create a custom "content 
type" for each type of list. It looks like you can define a vocabulary 
of terms that can be associated with one or more content types. These 
"terms" would be the features or categories that are assigned to the 
items and each vocabulary will only apply to each particular content 
type. I'm not seeing how to create a new content type, other than one 
page on drupal.org that explained how to clone a module (like "story") 
and give it a new name .. unless there's an easier way I guess that's 
how it is done.

On a test site, I've cloned the "page" content type module and made a 
"productitem" module .. and I've set up a vocabulary for this content 
type and assigned some terms. I added some products and assigned terms 
to those products. In order to display a list of filtered items, you 
specify the term IDs (1, 2, 3, ...) in a URL like .. taxonomy/term/1+4 
.. I set up a sample page with hard-coded links that filter on 
individual terms, and built a form with checkboxes and some javascript 
that builds the proper URL to display the items that match the selected 
terms. You can give it a test drive at ..

    http://iroots.net/drupaltest/products

I'm assuming that we'd want the checkbox type of interface, but I show 
the linking method as a possible alternative. This page also has a link 
to add a new product (feel free to register  and see what it's like to 
add these items). You'll note that the default content type does not 
have an URL field .. so the URL would have to be included in the 
description. It seems like this would be really nice to have as a 
separate field and then have the output formatted in a reasonable way.

Anyway .. just some experimenting .. let me know what you think.

...scott

-- 
Scott Prentice
Leximation, Inc.
www.leximation.com
+1.415.485.1892