Too much CCK? Try taxonomy.

Don't get me wrong, I love CCK and use it on most of my sites. It is very easy to create new fields and adjust the body or teaser content based upon field values. But in some cases, I think using taxonomy may be a better choice.

Let's consider a site selling new and used cars. A CCK content type "car" could be created to hold all data for a car to be sold. One possible bit of data to be captured is whether the car is new or used. Using CCK, you could create a field "car_new_used" to capture whether the car is new or used. But, this data could also be represented in the form of taxonomy terms. What if there was a vocabulary that included the terms "Used Cars" and "New Cars." Then you could just select these terms for a given car instead of storing the data in a custom CCK field.

A big advantage of the taxonomy approach is that you can quickly browse all new or used cars without building any new interfaces just by following tags in the node links. Another advantage is that tags are a common classification tool across many different software tools. Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger and Drupal all support tags to name a few. Other sites aggregating your content can import taxonomy terms via RSS much more easily than custom CCK fields, and they can sort and filter your imported data by tags which makes the data more useful.

From an SEO standpoint, a term "Used Cars" linked to a taxonomy listing of used car nodes provides much more "meat" for search engines to chew on than just text output from a CCK content field. And having linked text "Used Cars" on a node helps your site's keyword density and internal links for that search term.

I really think taxonomy has more upside than CCK for capturing basic field/value pair data. The trick is to restate the field/value pair as a classification term. CCK definitely has advantages for referencing and capturing data that doesn't lend itself to being used as taxonomy terms.