Talking Drupal #122 - Taxonomy or Entity Reference

That was a great topic. When D7 came along and taxonomy terms became field-able I think folks said "oh we can use terms just like nodes". That was a bad idea. I have worked on sites where myself or others decided to use terms like nodes and it causes problems. Here is one I ran into recently: I wanted to do a full text site search using Search API (and Search API Database Search, not Solr). One of the content types needed in the search results was a term. You cannot mix nodes and terms in the same Search API index. There is a module that allows you to mix them, but only if using Solr, and you lose functionality like autocomplete. So I had to custom code the search. I agree with the general idea that terms should only be used if you must have hierarchy or the vocabulary is simple like color: red, blue, green. And if a piece of content is to be viewed on it's own, it should be a node, not a term. If the hierarchy thing could be done with nodes, I would go so far as to consider never using terms. But, no reason not to use terms so long as it is just a category not actual content.