How To Merge Vocabularies on Drupal (Taxonomy Manager)

A couple of years ago I launched the Piece of Life project in the frames of this blog. The idea was simple - instead of building a separate website for our photo stories, incorporate it in already established blog

After a quick brainstorming  - it was realized using additional content types and vocabularies

I decided to run this project as a separate entity inside the frames of my blog for two reasons: Firstly, I'm an author of about 50% of images made for Piece of Life, so yes I have a voice to be heard by the other 50%. Second - we could go with a separate photo project website, most probably beautifully built on Drupal, but here is the catch - I didn't wanted to spend a lot of time and effort by building a separate  website before my mine blog (the one you are currently reading) hasn't reached 100,000 unique visitors per month. Back then blog averaged at about 40,000 users per month. And by now it has grown to about 60,000 100,000 users per month.

By implementing Piece of Life on the blog - I was looking for a simple thing - to kill two birds with one stone. To have a nice and interesting, supplementing content for a blog, to raise the number of visitors. Now a year later I can tell for sure - indeed I have supplemented and diversified the content, Speaking of numbers - Nah, I didn't make much difference. And, that makes me think - I was right when decided to implement this project on an already established brand, rather go and build a new one from scratch.

Now, back then I created a separate vocabulary to tag posts under Piece of Life content type. That seemed right then but doesn't seem good anymore now, as it gets complicated with upkeep different sections of the blog.

I decided to limit vocabulary count and was searching for some easy ways to merge existing vocabularies in one, and luckily I found Taxonomy manager module which did the job.

This module provides a powerful interface for managing taxonomies. A vocabulary gets displayed in a dynamic tree view, where parent terms can be expanded to list their nested child terms or can be collapsed.

The Taxonomy Manager has the following operations and key features:

  • dynamic tree view
  • mass deleting
  • mass adding of new terms
  • moving of terms in hierarchies
  • merging of terms (using the Term merge module in 7.x)
  • fast weight changing with up and down arrows (and AJAX saving)
  • AJAX powered term editing form
  • simple search interface
  • CSV Export of terms
  • i18n support for multilingual vocabularies (per language terms)
  • Double Tree interface for moving terms in hierarchies, adding new translations and switching terms between different vocabularies

For using the Taxonomy Manager you should have JavaScript and automatically load of images enabled in your browser.

After downloading and enabling module I was able to merge vocabularies with ease:

Merging vocabularies with Taxonomy manager in Drupal 7

Merging vocabularies with Taxonomy manager in Drupal 7

I decided to merge vocabulary Photo Tags and all its contents with vocabulary Terms

Taxonomy manager module allowed to move them with ease.

Once I had moved all taxonomies from one vocabulary to another, I deleted the unwanted one and reconfigured content type.