Checking out modules: Taxonomy Manager

In the EDAM manual page Taxonomy Suggestions, I outlined one of the ways I like to set up taxonomy for a generic site: one Vocabulary to tag what a piece of content is (a news article, a general info page, a review, etc.), and one Vocabulary to tag what the piece of content is about (Drupal, politics, clown attacks, whatever).

For this site, I use a short list of Terms for the first Vocabulary, but free tagging (i.e., free-form input of Terms) for the second – I had no idea how many Terms I'd want for tagging posts, and individually adding each desired new Term to a list seems a pain. (Incidentally, to enable free tagging, go to the target Vocabulary's "Edit vocabulary" form, and check the "Tags" box in the "Settings" group.)

Free tagging is handy stuff, with one drawback: free input makes it hard to keep consistent with your Terms. Over time, I ended up with multiple Terms that shouldn't have been there: "module" and "modules"; "theme", "themes", and "theming"; "site building" and "site design"; and so on.

How to consolidate those? You can, of course, edit the undesired Term "module" and change it to "modules", thinking that you'll now have all appropriate content tagged with the unified Term "modules". But you'll have no such thing; behind the scenes, Drupal is still tracking two separate Terms with separate ID numbers, both of which just happen to sport the same name, "modules". And those ID numbers are what counts for any purpose (such links or Views to list all content tagged with some Term), so things are now more confusing than ever.

So what's the solution? Manual editing, of course. Locate and edit each and every piece of content with an offending Term (like "module"), change that to the desired Term (like "modules"), and then...

Yeah, right. Not too likely when dozens or hundreds of nodes may be involved! Come on, what's the real solution?

The Taxonomy Manager module offers to help. In its creator's words, its bag of tricks includes:

• mass deleting
• mass adding of new terms
• moving of terms in hierarchies
• merging of terms
• fast weight changing with up and down arrows (and AJAX saving)
• AJAX powered term editing form
• simple search interface
• CSV Export of terms

In my case, merging of terms was just what I wanted. In the list of Terms the module displays for a chosen Vocabulary, you select two or more terms to be joined, click "Merge", and when prompted, specify what the new merged topic should be.

Worked great, with two things to watch out for:

1) A couple of settings for the module are at admin/settings/taxonomy_manager, but the actual tools are at admin/content/taxonomy_manager/ .

2) Sometimes the merge process would toss up an error message that didn't mean much to me. A check of the interface's Term list, however, showed that things seemed to have worked, and I haven't seen any ongoing troubles.

Taxonomy Manager is a helpful module and gets great reviews on the Drupal Modules site. Give it a whirl for heavy taxonomy needs.