Junk Bug Syndrome: How Drupal Taxonomies Can Lighten Your Website's Load
Has your website become like a junk bug? đ¨
A junk bug is a real creature! It camouflages itself by collecting debrisâdead leaves, lichen, bits of bark, and even the empty husks of its preyâand piles it all onto its back using specialized hooked bristles.
Some species can carry loads up to three times their own body size. Have a look at this wondrous little monstrosity:
Click to enlarge! This photo was taken by Ben Salb.
Imagine a website cluttered with three times more content than its target audiences actually need, compounding into a heap with a labyrinthine navigation structure.
Duplication of content, inconsistent labels, broken filters that donât surface what they should⌠thatâs what can happen if youâre not harnessing the power of Drupalâs taxonomies.
What are Taxonomies?
A taxonomy is Drupalâs way of letting you label and categorize content, and usually has two parts:
Vocabulary: a group of labels, categories, or tags.
Terms: the labels, categories or tags themselves.
Here are a few examples, common for higher ed and nonprofit organizations:
| Vocabulary | Terms |
|---|---|
| Subject Area | Science, Theology, Business, Art & Design |
| Program | Womenâs Initiative in Leadership, Research and Strategy Group, Public Opinion Project |
| Event Type | Study Group, Committee Meeting, Roundtable Discussion, Training Session |
| Region | North America, Asia, Africa, Europe, etc. |
| Experiment Type | Field Experiment, Cluster Randomized Trials, Comparative Audit Study, Instrumental Variable Regression |
| Resource Type | Case Studies, Toolkits & Guides, Webinars, Academic Research Papers |
Once your content is tagged with terms like these, Drupal can do amazing things.
What Taxonomies Make Possible
Instead of letting your site accumulate layers of disconnected pages like a junk bug hoarding debris, taxonomies make the whole structure work for you instead of weighing you down.
This matters most when you're managing information-dense websites that serve multiple audiencesâexactly the challenge most higher ed sites face.
Some of the benefits of well-organized taxonomies include:
Consistent Structure
You get to define shared terminology, customized to your institutionâs phrasing, and familiar to your target audiences.
You can even organize terms into hierarchical parent-child relationships, where appropriate.
By defining terms once and reusing them, teams avoid drift in naming, categorization, and meaning as content grows.
Editors can tag content quickly and confidently, making your siteâs structure easier to manage, surface, and reuse while preserving clarity even as publishing scales.
Discoverability
Taxonomies are the foundation of filtered search.
Instead of forcing visitors to guess the exact keywords to type, you can let them narrow by topic, department, audience, format, etc.
This allows various audiences like faculty, students and alumni to efficiently discover content aligned with their goals, via a single, flexible interface.
Personalization
In a previous article, we talked about how Drupal Views can produce lists like related publications, latest news, or upcoming events.
Taxonomies are how you make those lists specific.
For example instead of âupcoming events,â you can show âupcoming events about Public Health.â
In fact, you could even track what your users search for and dynamically display content about their preferred topics, in various focus areas throughout your site.
Automation
Another thing about those Drupal Views is that your team does not have to update them manually.
You publish a single article, event, or resource once, tag it correctly, and it appears everywhere it belongs, site-wide.
That is how a site can feel curated, even when a small team is maintaining it.
Access Control
With the right Drupal modules, taxonomy terms can control who can see and/or edit content (especially useful when public websites share a CMS with internal resources).
Some example scenarios:
Department editing boundaries: Content tagged "School of Dental Medicine" is editable only by that school's communications group.
Audience-based visibility: Events tagged "Prospective students" are public, while "Faculty senate" events are visible only to authenticated faculty and staff.
Group-specific student resources: Documents tagged "Debate Club" versus âEnvironmental Action Groupâ are available only to their respective group members.
When your access rules follow the same taxonomy used to organize the site, you reduce accidental exposure, and ownership stays clear.
Analytics & Reporting
Once content is consistently classified according to your taxonomies, you can explore questions like:
âHow many events do we have per program?â
âWhich topics are we publishing the most articles on?â
âWhich departments have outdated content?â
This kind of reporting is how you move from âwe think the site is messyâ to âhere are the specific areas to fix first,â with evidence you can share with stakeholders.
A Few Common Mistakes
Maybe your site started off with some well-defined taxonomies, but the junk bug syndrome has taken effect, due to some of these common pitfalls:
Allowing free tagging instead of defining an approved list of terms. This can result in duplicitous data like âComputer Scienceâ and âCompSciâ, or mixing concepts like âAlumniâ and âBiologyâ in the same vocabulary.
Using too many vocabularies or terms, causing editors to either guess or give up.
Making tag fields optional, or discontinuing a taxonomy, so now none of the pages that should have been tagged will show up in your search filters.
Renaming or deleting terms without auditing existing content, leading to broken filters or orphaned pages.
Treating taxonomy setup as a one-time task instead of something that needs periodic review as content evolves.
Taxonomies offer many benefits to prevent the accumulation of junk, but they are not necessarily a silver bullet. You have to combine taxonomies with proper structure and discipline.
Letâs talk about how to do thatâŚ
Steps to Get Started
So what does it take to harness the benefits of taxonomies, avoid the pitfalls, and lighten your websiteâs loadâso itâs not encumbered by piles of outdated, duplicated, and mislabeled content like a junk bug with too much debris on its back?
Set Expectations: This doesnât have to be perfect on the first try. Treat your taxonomies as a working system. Start small, and plan to refine as your content and needs evolve.
Prioritize: Pick the highest-impact pages and components that you already know should ârun themselves,â like homepage features, department news, program events, or related resources.
Define Taxonomies: Start with 1â3 vocabularies that match how people browse. Keep term lists tight, and avoid mixing unrelated concepts in one vocabulary. Common vocabularies include: Topics, Departments, Programs, Audiences, Formats.
Documentation: Document what each vocabulary is for, which content types it applies to, what the terms mean, and when editors should use it.
Governance: Decide who can add, edit, merge, or retire terms. Keep term changes controlled so the taxonomy stays consistent. Update roles and permissions in Drupal accordingly.
Review Regularly: Schedule periodic audits of terms and usage. For example at 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, then yearly. Resolve any issues found, remind or re-train editors, and adjust site structure as needed to accommodate growth.
Get Tagging! Make tagging part of the publishing workflow. Use tools (including AI-assisted tagging) to catch up older content and keep filters reliable.
The Transformation
Ok so back to junk bugs for a second.
Bug lifecycles are truly bizarre and amazing. Do you know what a junk bug eventually becomes?
A green lacewing! Check it out:
Click to enlarge! This photo was taken by Lesley Wilson.
Just look at that glorious fairy angel, compared to its former self. It was a diamond in the rough all along. đ
And if you follow the steps above, your site can go from a teetering tower of confusion to a sleek and beautiful information hub that delights and inspires your users, and eases your teamâs maintenance burden too!
Do you need some help organizing your taxonomies? Weâd be happy to jump on a call and get you started.
