Taxonomy module

The Week in Drupal: January 4, 2013

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:19:16 +0000

The Week in Drupal: January 4, 2013

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last week: December 29 - January 4.

Drupal News

Drupal core announcements: January 15th deadline set for configuration metadata discussions

Great Posts and Tutorials

Whats Wrong with the Project Application Queue?

Looking at Drupal 8’s JavaScript Changes

How to: Use Mandrill to Get Drupal’s Messages Through

Interesting New Modules

Views Responsive Grid - Provides a views plugin for displaying content in a responsive(mobile friendly) grid layout.

Opengraph Filter - An input filter that adds an summary of a webpage, from the urls found in the text. Like Facebook does when you post a link.

File Entity Preview - Provides a widget for file fields which displays a preview of the uploaded file as configured with the File Entity module.

GlewTiles - A port of DropTiles code to Drupal 7 as a theme with active Modern UI tiles similar to Windows 8.

MD WordCloud - Creates a block and page for each taxonomy vocabulary and shows it as wordcloud.

Wayne EakerJanuary 4, 2013

The Week in Drupal: December 29, 2012

Wayne Eaker — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:51:37 +0000

The Week in Drupal: December 29, 2012

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last week: December 21 - 29, 2012.

Great Posts and Tutorials

Overview of the Drupal Fivestar Module

Adding a class to nodes based on their view mode

Setup Markdown Filter with Syntax Highlighting in Drupal 7

Interesting New Modules

Batch add terms - A simple module for batch/mass adding taxonomy terms.

Registration Restriction - Allows site admins to restrict user registration by email domain.

OG Node Access Per OG Role - Provide a view permission for group content per OG role.

Views OG cache - Add Views time based cache per group.

Bootstrap menu - Represent Drupal’s multi-level menus in Twitter bootstrap markup.

Google Content Experiments - Enable the usage of Googles Content Experiments.

Backstretch Formatter - Provides a field formatter for jQuery Backstretch - A simple jQuery plugin that allows you to add a dynamically-resized, slideshow-capable background image to any page or element.

The following two modules are entries for the current challenge at ModuleOff.com.

Date link - Gives you a link on the display of most entities (nodes, users, taxonomy terms, and field collections) which lets you update the value of associated date fields to the current time.

Mark Complete - Enables you to click a link on a node display page that will update a date field to the current date. This is done via AJAX so there is no page refresh needed.

Wayne EakerDecember 29, 2012

Date module Drupal Fivestar module Organic Groups module Security Taxonomy module Theming Views module

The Week in Drupal: November 2, 2012

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:50:08 +0000

The Week in Drupal: November 2, 2012

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last week: October 26 - November 2, 2012.

Drupal News

Drupal 8 announcements: Proposal for RESTful entity API

Drupal 8 announcements: Don’t reimplement support for arbitrary tail paths

Great Posts and Tutorials

Talking to Drupal with Node.js

Creating a Drupal Slideshow with Views Slideshow

Moving Forward with Open Atrium 2.0

Making Drupal more User Friendly

Announcing PixGather - A mobile app to upload pictures to a Drupal site.

Corralling permissions into a grid

Memory usage revisited: when the Open Buffet is not to blame, rather Views

Message-subscribe — A New Subscription System

Interesting New Modules

Transclude - Defines an input filter that uses special tags to insert the contents of an external web page into text. For example, this can be useful is as a way of inserting the text of Wikipedia articles into nodes and having that text automatically updated whenever the Wikipedia article changes.

Word Link - Allows you to replace certain words with links.

Responsive Preview - View the site in different sizes easily with this module. A toolbar is displayed at the top with the configured resolutions. Click one and an iframe appears with the correct size applied. Great for developing responsive designs.

Apache Solr Document Links - Adds indexing of external links the Apache Solr Search Integration module.

Taxonomy Tree Block - Generates blocks of formatted taxonomy menu blocks (in a tree format) on a vocabulary basis.

Bulk User Delete - Allows you to bulk delete users through the admin interface. You provide a list of email addresses, one per line, and the users are deleted using the batch processing API.

Drifter - Allows any field to be floated left or right by providing a simple field formatter setting. A common use-case is floating images off to the side of a node.

Taxonomy Node Type - Automatically adds a taxonomy term to a node based on the node type.

Drupal Commerce MailChimp - This module integrates Drupal Commerce with the Mailchimp API’s ECommerce 360 feature for tracking store statistics for email campaigns sent via MailChimp.

Context Resolution - Extends the Context module with two additional conditions that enable developers to adapt to the users current screen resolution or browser width/height by using context reactions.

Date Facets - Provides date range facets similar to major search engines. (“Past hour”, “Past 24 hours”, “Past week”, etc.)

OG Invite People - Adds a missing invite functionality for OG 7.x-2.x.

Media OG Access - Allows limiting media browser list to media in current group or group subscriptions that the current user is a member of.

Wayne EakerNovember 2, 2012

The Week in Drupal: April 20, 2012

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:22:27 +0000

The Week in Drupal: April 20, 2012

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last weeks: April 13 - 20, 2012.

Drupal News

DrupalCon Munich: Submit a session for Munich until May 11!

Improved Session Selection Process for DrupalCon Munich

Great Posts and Tutorials

Creating a Custom Apache Solr Facet

Build advanced content listings – with Apache Solr, Search API, Facet API

Squeeze! Save disk space with MySQL compression - Not totally Drupal, but useful for Drupal devs.

Interesting New Modules

Image Delta Formatter - P provides a custom formatter for imagefields, that allows the user to specify which values (deltas) should be displayed.

Hierarchical Term Formatter - Provides hierarchical term formatters to display a taxonomy term reference on, say, a node as Parent > Child, rather than just Child.

Feeds hierarchical taxonomy - Import nodes with taxonomies such as Clothes > Children > Blue and automatically create terms as a hierarchical taxonomy tree.

Bendy - A feature module that creates a content rotating banner using the Views Slideshow module, Client-side Adaptive Image module and some CSS sorcery.

UUID Link - Allows use to link to entities using UUIDs, rather than ids. This prevents links breaking as content moves from one environment to another.

Entity Sync - Allows Rules driven synchronization of entities between Drupal installations.

Post Bookmarklet - Allows you to create bookmarklets to quickly create new nodes based on an external URL.

Wayne EakerApril 20, 2012

Drupal DrupalCon Munich Entity API Feeds module Imagecache module Search Solr Taxonomy module Views module

The Week in Drupal: April 13, 2012

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:47:03 +0000

The Week in Drupal: April 13, 2012

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last weeks: April 1 - 13, 2012.

Drupal News

The Future of Drupal Governance: Resources and Next Steps

Drupal core announcements: UI for hierarchical permissions, introducing permission rules

/drupalgive initiative

UX Team update Q1

Great Posts and Tutorials

Faster Mobile Sites

Using field_attach_load() to load one node field programmatically

Multi-headed Drupal

Module Monday: Flex Slider

Larry Garfield and the Symfony Integration in Drupal 8 (podcast)

OpenAid: A Drupal Distribution for NGOs and Non-Profits

Simple HTTP authentication for Drupal sites

Using Homebrew to Support Drupal on OS X

Using Drush to Mass Delete Comments

Do you want a PM day at Drupalcon? and 5 Ways to Get More Project Management Content into Drupalcon Sessions

Navigating your way in Drupal core development

Interesting New Modules

Geofield Proximity - Adds proximity fields and filters to Views.

Commerce Userpoints Grant - Allows you to sell a "points/credits" product and then grant users userpoints based on the quantity of the product within the order. Works with Rules and Drupal Commerce.

Mobile Switch - Provides a simple theme switch functionality for mobile devices, detected by browscap.

Webform CampaignMonitor - Provides a webform component in a checkbox format that lets you subscribe users to specific lists on Campaign Monitor

Path breadcrumbs - Path breadcrumbs allows site administrator to create a custom breadcrumbs for a custom page. For example, if you create a new page using Views module you may want to set custom breadcrumbs for it.

Wysiwyg TinyMCE Clear Buttons - Adds WYSIWYG buttons that allow you to insert a breaking element that will clear floated elements above it.

Mass Apply Filter - This module will run all nodes of a specified content type through a specified filter.

Nice groups - Provides a UI for picking OG audience that's similar to the Tagging module.

Taxonomy Hierarchy Views Argument - Provides a views contextual filter (argument) that takes a taxonomy term id and sorts (and optionally filters) the matching results in order of their taxonomical relevance (first direct matches, then parent terms, child terms, and finally sibling terms).

Wayne EakerApril 13, 2012

Drupal Drupal 8 Drupal Commerce Drupal Community DrupalCon Munich Entity API Geofield High Performance Mobile Organic Groups module Security Symfony Taxonomy module Theming UX Views module Webform module WYSIWYG module

The Week in Drupal: February 10, 2012

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:08:35 +0000

The Week in Drupal: February 10, 2012

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of February 3 - 10, 2012.

Great Posts and Tutorials

More Drupal Performance - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Commerce Module Tuesday: Commerce Customizable Products (Screencast)

Building custom social widgets

A Primer: DrupalCon Presentation Training

Designing a responsive conference schedule for DrupalCon Denver

Creating nodes with images using phonegap and services

Interesting New Modules

Views Dependent Filters - Allows the visibility of exposed filters on a view to be controlled by values in another exposed filter.

MO Auto-Add Terms - Automatically add new taxonomy terms to previously saved nodes that contain the new terms.

Renderer per node - Set the rendering style of a field on a per-node basis.

Registration Toboggan - Reduce registration form to just an email address.

Date part-of-day

Entityqueue - A rewrite of Nodequeue for D7 entities.

Views RSS: Google Products Elements - Create Google Product Feeds.

Feeds User Picture Mapper - Import user pictures by URL with Feeds.

SSN Storage

Resource Library Management System

Organic Groups Moderation

drush_apc - Get APC stats from drush

Node menu required - Allows menu links to be set required per content type.

Boilerplate - Theme with HTML5 Boilerplate, Modernizr and SASS.

Omega Bootstrap - Theme that integrates Twitter Bootstrap into Omega.

Wayne EakerFebruary 10, 2012

Caching Date module Drupal Drupal Commerce DrupalCon Denver Drush Entity API FieldAPI High Performance HTML5 Menus Organic Groups module Responsive Design Social Media Taxonomy module

The Week in Drupal: May 20, 2011

Wayne Eaker — Sat, 21 May 2011 02:06:30 +0000

The Week in Drupal: May 20, 2011

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of May 13 - 20, 2011.

Drupal News

HTML5 Drupal 8 Core Initiative Announced

Configuration Management Initiative Status Report

Chris Rock Using Drupal

Great Posts and Tutorials This Week

Quizable: The Integration of Drupal and iPhone

A New Way to Import Wordpress Content into Drupal

A Recipe for Linking Content Types via Titles and URLs

One-Click Registration with Facebook Connect

Having the Butler Tidy up Your HTML

Pagebuild Case Study

Interesting New Modules and Themes

Organic Groups 7.x-1.1-RC2 - Read about the new features.

Commerce Recurring - Trigger recurring actions based on purchased products with Drupal Commerce and Rules.

Module Monday: Field Validation

Webform Limit Submissions - Limit Webform submisstions to a certain number.

Daypass - Grant short-term access rights and free trials.

Taxonomy Documents - Create a document management system.

Content Clone Field - Adds a clone option to CCK fields.

User Knock - Protect the admin account by using a port-knocking style system to prevent brute force password cracking.

Wayne EakerMay 20, 2011

CCK module Drupal Drupal 8 Drupal Commerce Facebook HTML5 iPhone Mobile Security Taxonomy module Webform module Wordpress

The Week in Drupal: February 4, 2011

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:07:42 +0000

The Week in Drupal: February 4, 2011

A look at interesting new modules, articles and other Drupal news from January 28 - February 4, 2011.

Drupal News

DrupalCon Chicago Session Schedule Annouced

Great Posts and Tutorials This Week

Using XSS (Cross site scripting) to steal access

Beautiful, Easy Maps with in Drupal with Views and Mapstraction

Integrating Webform with Paypal

Creating new field formatters in Drupal 7

Drupal Coding Speed Tips, using an IDE

Using Render Arrays in Drupal 7

Interesting New Modules

Hashtags - Allows Twitter-style #hashtag tagging in your node content. Makes the hashtags links, and integrates with the standard taxonomy system.

Fancy Insert - Provides a nicer interface for inserting Imagefield images into node content with the Insert module.

Taxonomy Additions - Extra taxonomy features and improved Views integration for vocabularies and terms.

Atrium Leads - Add a "Business Lead" content type to Open Atrium to make it function like a sales CRM.

Media Pool - Allow a randomized default for Imagefields when an image hasn't been uploaded.

Dummy Image - Creates dummy placeholder images in nodes for missing Imagecache images. This is helpful if you are working on a development copy of a site and don't have all the uploaded images from the production server.

Wayne EakerFebruary 4, 2011

Drupal DrupalCon Chicago Imagecache module Imagefield module Location module Maps Open Atrium Programming Security Taxonomy module Webform module

The Week in Drupal: January 28, 2011

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 22:10:16 +0000

The Week in Drupal: January 28, 2011

A look at interesting new modules, articles and other Drupal news from January 21 - 28, 2011.

Great Posts and Tutorials This Week

Collapsing Folders with Taxonomy and Views_tree

Using Open Atrium as an Innovation Platform at the Department of Education

Performing a data migration with the Migrate module

Quick and Easy Donations with the Payment API

Top 5 Reasons to Choose Drupal as your CMS

Drupal Tip: Using $form['#after_build']

Interesting New Modules

Live Themer - Wow! Awesome! Build a theme for your Drupal site, live on the site, without writing code. Check out the video demo to see how it works.

Vocabulary Permissions Per Role - Allow users to edit only specific taxonomy vocabularies.

Fast 404 - Render 404 pages for images, etc., without a full Drupal page load. Will help performance on busy sites.

Date Repeat Instance - Allows you edit a single instance of a repeating Date created with the Date module.

Flot Charts for Views

Incremental Deploy - Automatically schedule nodes and system settings for deployment (with the Deploy module) as they are changed.

CCK Match - Double text field that requires users to type the same thing twice. For phone numbers, emails, etc.

Wayne EakerJanuary 28, 2011

Date module Deploy module Drupal Import Payment API Taxonomy module Theming Views module

Widespread SEO Problems with Drupal’s Taxonomy Module

Wayne Eaker — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:41:22 +0000

Widespread SEO Problems with Drupal’s Taxonomy Module

This week I’ve been working on fixing some duplicate content problems on our site coming from the Site Map module. In doing so, it’s become obvious that the design of Drupal’s taxonomy module makes it very easy to accidentally end up with Google indexing multiple copies of your term pages. This SEO problem isn’t just happening to Drupal rookies. Even top Drupal firms are screwing this up. Take a look at some examples from prominent Drupal company websites:

[Update: Most of these have now been fixed, so the results now are lower than I state. But they originally were correct.]

Lullabot’s Podcast Taxonomy Page
There are 84 Google-indexed pages for only 10 pager pages for this term. PLUS, there are an additional 20 indexed pages at the aliased URL for this page.

Development Seed’s “Drupal” Taxonomy Page
60 indexed pages for 31 pager pages, plus 201 indexed pages for the aliased address.

LevelTen’s SEO Taxonomy Page
19 indexed pages for 10 pager pages, plus 10 indexed pages for the alias address.

Acquia's Drupal Planet Taxonomy Page
55 indexed pages for 26 pager pages, plus 37 indexed pages indexed for the alias address.

It’s clear that Google is routinely picking up duplicates of taxonomy pages for Drupal sites. Why? Examining the results above, I see a few different reasons:

Some of these sites are not using the Global Redirect module, which means that the internal taxonomy page path “taxonomy/term/##” returns the exact same page as the aliased address. It doesn’t redirect. It just shows the same page. That in itself wouldn’t be a problem if nobody ever linked to the internal path. (because then Google would never pick it up) But, it’s clear that linking mistakes have been made at some point, or some module has exposed the internal links to Google by using them on a page. Now they are in the Google index and they won’t come out on their own.
The term depth argument for the taxonomy page (and taxonomy_term view) allows identical pages to be indexed at both at “taxonomy/term/##” and “taxonomy/term/0”, and potentially also at “taxonomy/term/##/all”. (The “/all” link may result in different content if you have hierarchical tags. But, in most cases, it’s the same.) The Global Redirect module can take care of the “/0” for you. Handling the “/all” will take some more effort. (see the solution below)
The taxonomy pages actually allow anything to be put in the depth argument position. This leads to a problem where if you have an accidental relative link in a node on the page, you will create an entirely new set of indexed pages. For example, on page two of the Development Seed results above are URLs that look like this:

https://developmentseed.org/taxonomy/term/42/www.mapbox.com?page=32

At some point in the past, there was probably a link that didn’t have an https:// at the beginning, so it was treated like a relative link. Google followed the link, and a whole new series of identical indexed pages was created by the following the pager links on these pages.

Fixing This Problem

There’s a few steps you can take on your Drupal site if you want to prevent these duplicate term pages from getting indexed or if you want to tell Google to remove already indexed pages from their results.

If you haven’t, fix your .htaccess to redirect to a single domain as described in this previous post.
Install the Global Redirect module. This will redirect the taxonomy page's internal path URL with and without the “/0” to your user-friendly alias URL.
To fix the issue with arbitrary text being appended to the URL, you can add a Rewrite rule to your .htaccess to redirect URLs with additional arguments to the main URL. The one I have put on this site is:

RewriteRule ^taxonomy/term/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ /taxonomy/term/$1 [NC,L,QSA,R=301]

This rule won’t work for sites that need to use the “/all” address, but I’m sure it can be rewritten to support that. I’m not a RewriteRule expert, though, so if someone has an alternative, please post it in the comments and I’ll update the post.
If you have hierarchical tags, and you want to make the default taxonomy page function like the “/all” page, you can enable the taxonomy_term view, remove the Term Depth argument, and then set your own depth on the Term ID argument.

Views with Pagers - Should You Index All the Pages?

The last thing you might consider doing is telling Google not to index pager subpages beyond the first one. This is a preference issue. Personally, I think it’s better to have Google focus its results on a single page for each term. In my opinion, it’s better for SEO and better for users who click on result links to go to the first page for a term rather than somewhere in the middle. But, I can understand why some people might want all the pages indexed to make sure nothing is missed.

If you do want to remove your pager pages from the Google index, you need to add a NOINDEX,FOLLOW meta tag to all the pager pages, except for the first one. There are two ways you can do this:

Change the setting for this in the Nodewords module - DO NOT DO THIS! While there is a configuration option designed for this purpose in Nodewords, it’s got a major bug (https://drupal.org/node/835172) in the stable release. Do not mess with this option, or you’ll likely end up getting NOINDEX on the exact pages you want Google to index. The thing is coded backwards or something. This issue's supposedly fixed in the -dev version if you want to try that.
Follow the instructions on this page to modify your theme page template to add the required meta tag to pager pages. This isn’t the best long-term option, especially if you’re using a standard template, since you’ll lose this change in an upgrade. But, until Nodewords is fixed, it’s the best way to go.

Conclusion

I’ve implemented all of the techniques listed above on this site, and now we have a single indexable page for each taxonomy term. All the other variations 301 redirect to the user-friendly aliased URL. Hopefully, this will allow us to concentrate as much page rank as possible on those pages for those terms. I recommend that everyone who uses the Taxonomy module on their Drupal website and is concerned about SEO take a look at how your site is being indexed. These fixes are pretty easy. But, it's clear (and surprising) that hardly anyone in the Drupal community has noticed this issue. I'm adding these items to my pre-launch checklist for all future websites.

Wayne EakerNovember 17, 2010

Drupal Drupal Planet Search Engine Optimization Taxonomy module