Drupal Tutorials and Blog Posts

Drupal 7 Taxonomy Changes

April 22, 2011 | Written by Steve Burge

Drupal 7 introduced many new changes. One of these involves Taxonomy, Drupal's way of organizing content.

Let's see what's changed with Taxonomy and what you'll need to do differently in Drupal 7:

Taxonomy in Drupal 6

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In Drupal 6, Taxonomy was under the Content management link.

To organize your content you went through a three step process. First, you added a Vocabulary which acts as a general container for all your specific categories.

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Then you added the Terms which are the specific categories you'll use to organize content:

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Then you'd go and write your content, organizing it with the Terms:

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So the whole process of organzing your content in Drupal 6 involved three steps:

  1. Content management > Vocabulary > Add vocabulary
  2. Add terms
  3. Create content

Now let's see the process of organizing your content in Drupal 7:

Taxomony in Drupal 7

The first thing you'll notice that is the main navigation links have changed. Taxonomy is now under the Structure link.

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The setup process is similar to Drupal 6 at this point. We need to add a Vocabulary and then Terms. First, click Add vocabulary:

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Enter the name of the vocabulary and click Save. You'll notice that there are far fewer settings here than in Drupal 6. In Drupal 7 those settings come later.

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Click add terms next to your new vocabulary. When you're finished, click the List tab at the top of the screen.

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You'll now see the terms laid out as below:

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Now, here's the big change with Taxonomy in Drupal 7. Instead of going to write your content, click on the Structure link again and then Content types:

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Click on manage fields next to the content type you'd like to add a taxonomy to:

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The important thing now is to add a new field using the Term reference field type:

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Click Save and you'll be asked to choose the vocabulary you want to add:

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Click Save field settings and you'll have one more screen to complete. This is where all the settings have moved to that we mentiond earlier.

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Scroll down, click Save Settings and you're finished. Your new vocabulary has now been added to the content type. It's definitely a longer process than in Drupal 6.

In Drupal 6, Taxonomy was it's own system but in Drupal 7 Taxonomy has now become part of the new Drupal 7 Fields system.

However, the final step is the same in both versions: go and write your content. Click on Add content and you'll see your new Vocabulary and Terms:

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Comments  

 
#1 Amberly 2011-04-27 15:24
Thank you SO MUCH for the step by step. I'm very new to Drupal and it is scary to just start clicking around. This info is just what I needed.
 
 
#2 iowawebco 2011-04-27 16:55
You're very welcome! Look forward to our online Drupal class coming soon :)
 
 
#3 drupaljohngo 2011-07-01 09:58
Cool. Understandable now.So, if I had audio files for a vocabulary, and mp3/wav/aiff as terms I could create an content type for uploading audios files and assign them their vocabulary fileds and terms. What is next? create a View and call it up to list all mp3's?
 
 
#4 Sameer 2011-07-25 03:15
Thanks, its very nice article,
i am new to drupal and want to make a test website in which i have different categories of pages, videos and images.
can you please more elaborate this article that how we can use this Terms into menu's
 
 
#5 kumar 2011-07-30 04:02
Its worked
Thankyou so much!
 
 
#6 Digitzfone 2011-07-30 18:44
FINALLY I understand it! Thank you!
 
 
#7 janko 2011-08-06 09:12
thank you so much, i wanted tutorial just like this one!!!!
 
 
#8 steve 2011-08-09 07:04
Thanks Kumar, janko, Digitzfone

This was just about the most common question we got from students who were moving from Drupal 6 to 7.
 

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