I like to tag the posts on this site with the categories that they fit in, to make the navigation of the site easier. Of course, for this to be worth the effort, a menu is called for, a menu that contains links to each of these categories so all it takes is a single click to deliver every post tagged for that category.

I’ve had such a menu for quite a while - but I have had to manually edit this every time I want to add a new category, which has inhibited me from creating new tags when needed (such as the Firefox Plugins category) until I have time to muddle around with the menu interface.

Having recently written another article on a Firefox Plugin (bringing the total of such articles to 4) I came to the conclusion that there had to be a better way. I began a search for a method to auto generate such a menu, and soon discovered that a module named Taxonomy Menu existed, which would serve exactly the function that I desired.

All that Taxonomy Menu required in dependencies was that the Taxonomy module be enabled, and so I was quickly able to get this new module installed and ready for experimentation on my site by unpacking it into the modules directory and enabling all the modules it came with.

Although I had expected a great deal of time spent on experimentation to get everything configured in a way that would at least be serviceable, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, unlike most of my forays into new territories in computing, I had no struggle whatsoever to get the module working.

To activate and choose the options for Taxonomy Menu you navigate to the page for editing the Vocabulary you wish to have said menu for. Here you must do basic configuration, such as naming the content, and adding it to an existing menu (I will confess, here I wish that a menu was simply generated so that I could just add it as a block).

I put it into the existing Categories menu, which I then had to edit to delete the old entries in it.

With that, I had an acceptably configured menu. The only area in which it is currently lacking is that I need to integrate it with the PathAuto module so that the URLs that you are directed to are human readable - but for the time being this is more than adequate.