Taxonomy is a great way of categorizing your content, and in this case we'll take it a step further to organize your content and create a dynamic layout. In a recent situation, we created a taxonomy category for a given node type and assigned 4 terms to the category. The node type contained an image field and a description. We wanted to show a view all the node images, but categorized by taxonomy term. I thought the best way to accomplish this was to get a list of all the taxonomy terms, loop through them, pass the term ID as an argument to a view, and output each view's html dynamically. In the following code snippet, I created a module that generates a block [see below]
When creating your view, make sure you add an argument for "Taxonomy: Term ID". In my example, I selected "Use empty text" for the default argument option to prevent taxonomy terms from being shown if they do not have any matching nodes.
<?php
function MYMODULE_block($op='list', $delta=0) {
$block = array();
switch ($op) {
case 'list':
$block[0]['info'] = t('MYBLOCKTITLE');
return $block;
break;
case 'view':
$block['subject'] = NULL;
$block['content'] = NULL;
$block_content = "";
// define vocab name
$vocabName = 'MYCATEGORYNAME';
// define view name
$viewName = 'MYVIEWNAME';
// define node type
$nodeType = 'MYNODETYPE';
// get vocabularies for this node
$vocabs = taxonomy_get_vocabularies($nodeType));
// ensure vocabs exist
if (count($vocabs)==0 || !$vocabs) return $block;
// loop through vocabs and look for matching name
foreach ($vocabs as $k => $v) {
if ($v->name == $vocabName) {
$vocabID = $v->vid;
break;
}
}
// ensure vocabID exists
if (!$vocabID) return $block;
// get vocab term tree
$tree = taxonomy_get_tree($vocabID);
// loop through tree and collect term IDs
$termIDs = array();
foreach ($tree as $k => $v) {
$termIDs[$v->tid] = $v->name;
}
// loop through term IDs and create views html
foreach ($termIDs as $k => $v) {
// get view object
$view = views_get_view($viewName);
// ensure result is an object
if (!is_object($view)) continue;
// create view html
$viewHtml = views_build_view('block', $view, array($k), FALSE, $view->nodes_per_block);
if (strlen($viewHtml)) {
// show the taxonomy term name in an <h3>
$block_content .= "<h3>$v</h3>";
// add the view html to the block
$block_content .= $viewHtml;
}
}
$block['content'] = $block_content;
return $block;
break;
}
}
?>The result will resemble the following structure...
Taxonomy Term 1
[node] [node] [node]
Taxonomy Term 2
[node] [node] [node]
Taxonomy Term 3
[node] [node] [node]