Drupal:Categorized Stories

As I mentioned before a story in Drupal is very much like a blog entry on a blogging site like Blogspot, Blogger or Wordpress. The primary difference is in Drupal a story can effectively be placed anywhere in your site unlike most blog engines that post only to the front page. Stories are the bulk of content in most simple websites. They are easy to change update or remove from various pages in your site and are incredibly flexible. By using the most basic forms of taxonomy you can easily sort various different topics into easily accessible groups. Because this guide is written for setting up a basic website I will walk through the process of setting up a simple taxonomy, or organizational structure, that will allow you to categorize your story posts by preselected keywords.

A Very Basic Taxonomy:

To create a new organization structure you will use the taxonomy tools. Go to Content Management -> Taxonomy. There are two parts to taxonomy, vocabularies andterms. As you may suspect, a vocabulary is a list of terms.  For a basic site a single vocabulary with a short list of terms will give a lot of structure. To create a new vocabulary click "Add Vocabulary" at the top of the page. The new vocabulary needs a name, something simple and descriptive is good. For our example something like Post Group would be good. A description can be added along with help text. In a simple site this is probably not necessary. Next, the types of posts that are going to be categorized by this vocabulary should be selected. In our example this should be stories types only. Last for our purposes you should check the box for required. This will require that every post is put into one of the named categories.

Next you need to create the actual topics you are going to be posting about. For example if you are interested in gardening you might want to post about vegetables, roses, shade gardening, paths and general (as a catch all). Click Add Terms in the vocabulary line you just created. Type a topic into the term field, add a description if you want or if the term is not self describing and click save. It will automatically bring up the dialog for adding another term. Continue this process until all you have input all of your terms. One additional note: just below the description field in the term edit page there is a line of text something like this. "The ID for excluding or including this element is: edit-description - the path is: admin/content/taxonomy/edit/term/1" The important thing to note is the number that is associated with each term it will be very useful later. 

Now Drupal magic takes over. Drupal has now created web url where all posts assigned to a given term will be visible. Each of these terms will effectively have its own blog where you can post. Drupal places these pages at www.example.com/taxonomy/term/(the number from above). Now, assuming you have the Path module enabled you can create a pretty location like www.example.com/roses and assign it to the rose term. Go to Administer-> Site Building-> URL Aliases. Click "Add alias". You will see a field with your website URL followed by a space to type. Type in the rest of path as noted above with the appropriate number for the term. In our example, if the rose term was the first one added it will be term number 1, resulting in taxonomy/term/1 being the rest of the URL. Next you will enter the rest of the pretty address you want to be associate with this page. In our example it would be roses to create a url www.example.com/roses. Click save to make it so. Repeat this process for each term.

Now when you post a new story you will have to select an associated post topic. Your posts will be conviently sorted for easy access and search engines will see the URL and know that it is associated with the appropriate topic not "term 2".