Choose between CCK, Taxonomy of both for content structure and ontology

    I just commented in an external blog discussion about whether to use CCK or Taxonomy for Drupal structured content. The theme of my argument is that these two approaches of structuring content within the Drupal framework are not in competition, but just two tools that complement each other and can be used together to avail power to strcuture, define and query CMS content in a granular and flexible fashion. Granted, these two tools have overlapping features, and this fact should be viewed as an advantage as opposed to an unnecessary redundancy and cause for competition between the two approaches and schools of thought in Drupal content architecture.

    Examples:

    1. You are creating different content with the same structure, it may be redundant to create different CCK types just as a foundation for output (querying/VIEWS/Search). In such situations, I find it idea to create one CCK and use Taxonomy to differentiate between the sub-types. Granted you could create a field and use it to differentiate the sub-types, but that is tantamount to attempting to rebuild taxonomy within CCK.
    2. Another common advantage of CCK is the fact that you can easily move a node from one taxonomy term to another after creation while it is a development job to nicely move a node from one CCK-type to another and match the fields, data types etc

    Advantages of combining CCK and Taxonomy

    By looking at the possibilities in VIEWs, it becomes clear that CCK and taxonomy can and should be combined and sometimes layered to provide granular control to content output to the point where it can begin to appear to your readers that the content presentation is manually controlled. Especially in Drupal 6 - VIEWs where the introduction of 'Relationships' makes it possible to filter and compare content to multiple dimensions and finely control the influence of each factor and level of ontology (tagging and field content) to achieve human-like intelligence - that is for another blog entry another day.