FreeLists / haiku-web / [haiku-web] Re: Migrating from categories to taxonomy (#1136)

["Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki)" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Niels Reedijk wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been investigating the category module, and how to migrate to the
> more generic taxonomies, and - let me put it this way - it is going to
> be a lot of work.
>
> The category module binds together a term and a node (called a
> container). The terms are  ordered in a hierarchy. The category module
> also has the feature that it generates automatic menus, but we do not
> use that feature. Parent containers can also generate a list of terms,
> and autogenerate a list of terms and the nodes that are related to
> that.
>
> The category module allows for exporting the categories to taxonomies,
> but it does not convert the currently associated nodes to contain the
> taxonomical tags. Also, the containers are bluntly deleted.
>
> Migrating from categories to taxonomies would mean:
> 1. Salvage the containers and turn these into another content type.
> Since containers are supposed to be generic, I would prefer them to be
> converted to the 'page' content type.
>
> On the database level there are two types of containers. The first
> type is 'category-cont', which means the node describes the category.
> The second type is the 'category-cat' which is an autogenerated index
> of all the content in that is in that category. The latter one can be
> replaced by manual database queries, for which I have already found
> the code.
>
> 2.  The current content happily corresponds with a certain category,
> but as soon as you export the category to vocabularies, the existing
> nodes will not get any terms assigned to them. So what we should do is
> write a script that:
> a. Extracts all the nodes associated to a specific category
> b. Cache the categories and subcategories
> c. Then a person should manually export the category through the website
> d. The script would find the term id's associated with the former categories
> e. Then assign the new term id's to the nodes associated with a former category
>
> In short: it's not a trivial operation, and would require a lot of
> energy. The website short of grew into this way of organizing info.
> The category module seems to be underdeveloped, but at the other hand:
> it keeps things together right now.
>
> I'm not sure what is wiser: trying to migrate to Drupal 5 with the
> category module, or trying to free ourselves from it and afterwards
> migrating to Drupal 5.
The category module is certainly underdeveloped. That being said, it is 
working for all intents and purposes now, so I personally do not feel 
there any urgency to replace it. That's just my opinion though. :)
Cheers,

Koki
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