SpeakingX

Drupal taxonomy module is a useful and powerful module that allows you to categorize your web content. No matter you are setting your personal blog or a large community website, you probably will need this feature at some time. Adding vocabularies and terms in Drupal is not difficult. However, if you have a large amount of terms, you'll find this process quite time consuming and tedious. In this article, I will show you very briefly how to add terms in bulk.

There are three contributed modules in Drupal at your disposal that allow you to add multiple terms in a single run.

• Taxonomy Batch Operations
• Taxonomy Manager
• taxonomy_xml

As shown in the screenshot below, Taxonomy Batch Operations provides a text area that allows you to enter one term a line. You can either manually enter them if you only need a few terms, or copy&paste if you have a long list in a text file or spreadsheet. Simple interface, but powerful enough to meet most your needs.

With this module, it's also possible to delete multiple terms on one page as shown below:

Since the current version is still buggy (see http://drupal.org/node/118983) and the patches are not committed yet, I made the tarball myself with the patch to save some trivial work for others (taxonomy_batch_operations.tar_.gz).

Taxonomy Manager provides many interesting features, which could be very useful for managing taxonomy terms. For adding new terms, however, it only allows maximum six terms each time. Apparently a lot of manual work is still needed if you have hundreds thousands of terms.

Finally with taxonomy_xml  you can import and export vocabularies and taxonomy terms via XML. Obviously you need to have an XML file first in order to import the terms. To make my life and hopefully your life easier, I wrote a simple perl script to convert a text file with a list of terms into a XML file readable by taxonomy_xml module. To use this script, just run

perl taxonomy_list2xml.pl input.txt output.xml

A sample list of world languages generated by this script is attached below, and a live demo can be seen here (note: IE seems to have problems opening this file).