working on applications and technology

To organize a website's content and relate it with the website menu usually require much consideration. The content category and menu together make up of the website ' s main structure and navigation path which might have great impact on experience of the visiting users . A good Menu and navigation system 'persuade' the visiting user navigate to other topic of the website they might be interesting and help to retain the user.

Fortunetly, Drupal provide powerful categorization and menu function. We will describe the popular implmentation of content categorization and menu for a drupal website.

Required drupal module

• Taxonomy Menu
• Taxonomy Manager
• CCK

We will use the example for a travel site for explaination. Suppose a travel site has the contents devided into the following category and menu:

• city event & history
• shopping
• hotel
• restarants
• entertainment

Steps to implement the website categorization and menu

1. Add content type for each of these categories(e.g. cck_hotel for hotel category, cck_entertainment for category entertainment. by defining one content type for each of these categories, you could customize different content structure for different category (cck). For example, the hotel content type might need a set of structure(cck fields) for better description of the hotel(e.g. picture for rooms, hotel service description etc), while the city content type might not need those complex cck fields. Of course we could also use only one content type (e.g. the default 'story' content type) for all of our content, It is all depends on what you want to do with it.
2. Setup each categories by defining corresponding vocabulary . For each of these vocabularies, we will set their properties as :
   • Required - set to 'checked' for we want our post belong to at least one of these categories.
   • Weight - set to '-10' for we want the main category to appear first
   • Content Type - Associate each vocabulary to its content type(e.g. vacabulary hotel to content type cck_hotel)
   • Taxonomy Menu - set to 'Primary links'

     This is the power of the taxonomy menu module which build menu for the relate the vacabulary automatically:

     

   • Continue to add term to the category vacabulary (e.g. entertainment might have term 'bar', 'golf' etc)

     Now back to your website, you should see the category menu appear in your main menu. When we post one article, we 're required to select the correponding content type and the term.

3. Setup the 'free tagging' vacabulary

• Content Type - select all the aboved content type
• Tags - set to 'checked'

Except from the required category selection, we also want to be able to tag our content with any tags we like, for example, we might want to tag content about restarant with the city name or place name which we do not already define with our vocabulary.

Now we finish both the website categorization and menu system!