Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module for Drupal 6 released today!

After spending the last week and a half coding like a mad man and testing the thing to make sure there were no glaring bugs I am finally releasing the Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module. This module took a lot more time and effort than I had expected due to the fact that the Drupal api doesn’t provide a taxonomy tree array that gives all of the necessary information in order to integrate with the JQuery menu module and also due to the fact that I had to rewrite a couple of functions in the JQuery menu module in order to get it to open up for other modules to use.

I have set up an example block so that you can see the module in action. If you look to your lower right at the block labeled “Categories” you can see it in action.

In addition to the tight integration with the JQuery menu module which gives it the nice click and expand functionality this module is very flexible in the way it allows you to create blocks and route the paths by vocabulary. With the Advanced Taxonomy Module (unlike any other taxonomy related menu I have used) you can create multiple blocks with total control over the number of vocabularies per block and the routing of the paths for each vocabulary per block.

To see an example take a look at the Categories block that I have set up as a demo. While I set the “Topic” Vocabulary to route to the default taxonomy path (taxonomy/term/%tid) For the “Drupal Tutorials by Difficulty Level” I instead routed the links to a view which was designed to catch the tids as arguments. I also built in the ability to customize the link titles (the text viewed when hovering over the link) as well as the titles of the individual vocabularies (with the option of disabling the titles altogether by entering ). This flexibility may not seem very interesting to the Drupal novice, but to an experienced Drupal developer this will open up a whole new world of possibilities for views and other modules which make use of taxonomy.
The module also comes with a bonus Forums block which gives a click and expand menu for forum hierarchies.

The Advanced Taxonomy Module requires JQuery Menu 6×1.8 or higher and will require a visit to the modules page to clear the registry.

To download the module please visit the project page at http://drupal.org/project/taxonomyblocks