Categories are how we recognise, differentiate, group and understand different things.

We do this all the time in our daily lives. For instance we categorise foods into what we like and don't like. We categorise things in our in-tray as urgent, not so urgent, do it tomorrow or forget. We categorise experiences as good or bad. 

There are many ways of categorising things.

We can create hierachcical structures for our categories. These are called taxonomies. Or we can create flat single levels of categories - in other words just a list of terms.

The problem with categorisation is that people have different concepts ogf how things should be categorised. For example a child's view of a taxonomy for cars might be Size, Colour, Shape, Speed. An adults might be Fuel economy, Number of Seats, Engine Size and so on.

It is easy to get confused about menus and categories.

Menus are simply links to other bits of your website or other resources on the Internet.

Categories are places on your website where you organise content.

If you create a category, then you can put content into it.

But you wont be able to see the list of content inside the category unless you create a menu item that links to it. 

Vocabularies help us to organise our category terms.

Vocabularies are a collections of words - or Terms as they are called in Drupal - that we use to organise content of a similar type.

Categories are synonymous with Terms. In other words if I create the term 'Red' then Red is a category I can put content into. You will get used to this when you start creating your taxonomic system.

Example of a vocabulary use

We might create the following terms to categorise car engine size

• less than 1000cc
• 1000-1200cc
• 1200-1800
• more than 1800

We can collect these terms into a vocabulary called Cars along with many other terms we associate with cars.

We can create another vocabulary called Books and put the following terms into it