Documentation for the Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module Drupal 6

This page is intended to serve as the base documentation for the Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module. Only questions or comments directly related to the documentation should be posted here. Bug reports, feature request and support request should be filed on the issue queue at the Advanced Taxonomy Blocks project page. Those who are looking to find out how to use Views to have nodes of children terms shown instead of just nodes that are tagged with the term itself should view this tutorial on overriding the taxonomy page for Views 2.

The Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module is more than just another taxonomy menu; it provides a level of configurability and flexibility not present in any other Drupal taxonomy menu related module to date. In addition to allowing administrators to create multiple blocks with the ability to choose which vocabularies will display in each block, the module also gives you control over the full path of the links. Using what I labeled path patterns, it lets you choose the pre-aliased path to any landing page of your choosing on a per vocabulary basis (you can have more than one landing destination within a single block). This makes it especially useful for routing links to views that accept taxonomy term ids as arguments.

If you are new to Drupal the module is designed to work out of the box with a default Taxonomy block already in place. Once you have installed the Advance Taxonomy Blocks module you can go to the blocks page and you will find a block labeled "Categories - Taxonomy Block".

If you are a battle hardened Drupal coder and you have more precise needs then you will want to visit the admin pages provided by the module at "admin/settings/taxonomyblocks" and learn your way around. This tutorial is intended to walk you through the configuration options available in that section and thereby help you take full advantage of the module’s capabilities.

When you first go to the admin/settings/taxonomyblocks page before having made any customization you will see the following two blocks: Categories and Forums. The Categories block when un-altered automatically shows all existing vocabularies (with the exception of the Forums vocabulary) in the default order that has been set for those vocabularies on the standard taxonomy administration page (admin/content/taxonomy). The Forums vocabulary automatically holds a list of all available forums active on your site. If you ask why I added this block it is because Forums are created with taxonomy, so I figured I might as well add it here since it took almost no additional work. These two default blocks are created automatically at install time and cannot be deleted. They can however be configured or reset to original defaults using the links to the right of the title.

New taxonomy blocks can be added by clicking the "Add New Taxonomy Block" tab at the top of the page. Once you click that link you will be prompted to enter a title for the new block, after which you will be taken directly to the configuration page for that block.

Configuration options for Advanced Taxonomy Blocks per Vocabulary

Enable/Disable:On the configuration page you will see a row for each of the enabled vocabularies on your website with a check box to enable or disable them individually. It is important to understand that alterations that you make to this page have no effect on the vocabulary itself or on any other blocks that you may have set up. It was set up this way to enable customizing blocks individually without altering the original information.

Node count options: In addition to being able to turn vocabularies on and off for a specific block you can also chose which content types you want to show counts for each term. This option does not effect the actual number of results that will show up on the landing page directly, but if you have configured the vocabulary to send the links to a view using a particular path pattern (which I will go into shortly) and that particular view is set to filter according to content type, then it may be useful to make the content type settings match up so that the landing page will not be out of sync. You can also choose to have no node count at all.

Custom Title: The custom title setting applies to blocks in which you have multiple vocabularies in one block (as is the case for the default Categories block). In such blocks each vocabulary has the title of the vocabulary above the menu by default. If for some reason you want to display a different title for a particular vocabulary you can change it here. You can also enter to have only the menus show up with no title separating them.

Path Pattern: Path patterns are used to allow you to link to anywhere on your site rather than being limited to the standard taxonomy pages. The default is taxonomy/term/%tid. On run time the %tid is replaced for the actual tid. An example of how this can be used can be seen in the Categories block I run on this site. If you look to at the Categories block to your right you will see a vocabulary that I have given the title “Drupal Tutorials by Difficulty Level”. All of the links in that block make use of a path pattern that goes to a view that accepts two arguments. Since the taxonomy tid is the first argument and the catch all wild card is “all”, I set the path pattern as follows: drupal-tutorials/%tid/all. To really make the most of this option you have to understand views arguments, which is a whole subject in and of itself.

List of place holders for Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module:
%tid - The tid of the term
%termname - Text version of the current term
%nid - The node nid if a page is a node
%nodeuid - The uid of the user who created the current node (if that page is a node)
%nodetype - The node type of the current page.
%useruid - The uid of the current user viewing the page.
%vocabname - The name of the vocabulary.
%vid - The vocabulary id of the term.

LinkTitle Pattern: The link title pattern allows you to control what users see when they hover over the links in the menu for each particular vocabulary. The default is set as "Content tagged with @termname" where the @termname is substituted for the real term name at run time. Using the example of the Drupal Tutorials by Difficulty Level section, I set the link title pattern as “Drupal Tutorials marked as @termname”. You can hover over the links to see the result.

Weight: Used to arrange the vocabularies order of appearance within each block.
Reset: Reset an individual block to its original settings.
Omit tids: This setting allows you to chose tids that you don’t want to appear on that particular block. This setting is particularly useful if you have a particular vocabulary that has a top level term that you don’t necessarily want users to see and would rather only expose the children. By checking off the term in question it has the effect of disabling that term for this block, and like a disabled menu item the link disappears to reveal the children of that link.

Reset All: This of course resets the entire block to defaults. Useful if you mess everything up.

That’s pretty much all there is to it for now. There will probably be a couple of new features and options added in the future, and this page will be updated accordingly.