Product categories/taxonomies

I’m looking for advice from super admis who are further down the path than me. I have hubs testing out the platform who want more categories and sub-categories created. I’ve been trying to heed the advice in the user guide about not making too many because they will clutter the filters page. But I’m finding it hard to tell people to use an existing category when they want new ones. We have a hub testing now who is more like a co-op store – so there are lots of categories they need. Does anyone have feedback to share on the categories - how many is too many? @sstead @CynthiaReynolds @MyriamBoure @mags

Hey @Theresa, below is a screenshot of the categories/taxonomies that we use. I haven’t heard from anyone requesting more, which is actually surprising :stuck_out_tongue:

For the local instance we’re trying to automatize this step: https://github.com/coopdevs/ofn-taxonomy

Hopefully we’ll be able to allow other instances to create similar repositories and get their instances seeded with taxonomy data automatically. Still WIP though…

very helpful thanks @sstead.

Can super admin delete a primary and/or secondary category once it is created? (like - even if I ensure there are no products attached to it?)
I’ve been trying to ‘rename’ - which is possible - but because I accidently created too many initially (when I had no idea what I was doing), there are still too many.

Can you ‘move’ a subcategory from one place to another? I haven’t been able to figure that out.

In my dreams I would love a hub to be able either to create it’s own taxonomy and map it to the instance one so that the products can be generally searchable, and/or use products tags to be able to created other more flexible products category and display them in their shop :slight_smile: But that’s a next stage thing I guess !

Hi – I’m having some strange taxonomy issues - see below. Originally the taxonomy setup through configuration went fine - and the options looked just like what @sstead has shared above. But this week I noticed something is wrong, and I wonder if the taxonomies got disrupted with the last version update. Is that possible @maikel?

All the taxonomies I originally created are available for categorizing products. And in the shopfronts, they all show up as filters. But this week I noticed that in the shopfront, the ‘daughter’ taxonomies show up as parents. I mean there is no heirarchical structure. “Leafy Greens” don’t show up if I search for 'Vegetables" for example. When I go to configuration to try to fix this - I am not able to even see the tree structure any longer. This used to be OK - and I think maybe this is just since the last update and I’ve just noticed it now. Maybe I’ll have to re-create them - but will this mess up the taxons that are currently ‘attached’ to existing products?


This is possible, but I don’t recall anyone else having this problem. I think your last update was in December, I’m not sure what we changed at the time. I can’t see anything related in the release notes. Do you remember when it was still working?

I just looked in the database and Leafy Greens are still a child of Vegetables.

Now I checked our staging server and our production server and they have the same problem, only the root taxonomies are shown, no child taxonomies.

You may have found a new bug. Actually, I had a look and Kirsten discovered this in Taxonomies / Product Categories broken · Issue #1965 · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub. Unfortunately, it got marked as fixed without proper testing (it looks like). From the comments, I would guess that this broke in the last Spree upgrade.

I think you should create a new issue on Github. The last one was rated s3.

I tried to put an issue in github - first time I’ve done this - so not sure if I did it correctly. @maikel can you look and edit if necessary? https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/2421

Well done Theresa. I just added a bit of detail at the end. Not everybody is using taxons in the way you do. So the search is not really affected in Australia. I think Katuma doesn’t use the nested categories either. But it’s a pretty significant bug.