I've been working away on a project at CommonPlaces that 99.9% of the site is relying on taxonomy organization to sort and browse through over 12,000 nodes, and have leared a lot about taxonomy in the process.

Over some discussions, and a ton of research on a long string of current taxonomy modules, I've found that there is not a lot currenly working for Drupal 6 that can really manipulate the taxonomy system in a way that suits my needs on this current project, and for future needs/impelementations/ideas. There are a handful of decent taxonomy modules out there, another handful that have been stalled or had their feature set greatly reduced due to API changes in Views 2, and a lot that just plain suck.

After days of installing and testing portions of modules hoping to find the right recipie to create what truly seemed like an easy task, I gave up, and am writing 100% custom code to handle this project. The only integration is with the taxonomy_image module, which is very simple, and very good at it's job. As this project moves down it's path to an alpha release, I've seen more and more ways to really work over the taxonomy API functions, and how I can render some fantastic interfaces with a custom module based completely on a hierarchical taxonomy tree.

Bending Taxonomy to your will

The great thing about the Drupal system is the API that will allow me to really do anything and create anything based on the internal taxonomy system. I have seen in this current project a million ways to create a slick interface (multiple interfaces) for a "real" taxonomy browser.

With that in mind, I am currently setting up a new repository under contributions/modules to begin work on this project. It will branch off greatly from the current work done to include more flexibility than the current project needs, but in the end, it will become a must have module for taxonomy heavy sites.

The module

The project is now officialy created at Drupal.org, under the name Taxonomy Rockstar (drupal.org/project/taxonomy_rockstar).

More information will follow soon after I have lined out this prototype based on what I'm working on, and where it needs to go to be a viable community module.