5. Taxonomy enabled for context

5. Taxonomy enabled for context#

Status#

Rejected. The “all available taxonomies” advanced setting described was never implemented, and the OrgTaxonomy subclass of taxonomies was instead replaced with a TaxonomyOrg model that links organizations to regular Taxonomy instances.

Context#

The MVP specification says that taxonomies need to be able to be enabled/disabled for the following contexts: instance, organization, and course.

Taxonomy Administrators must be able to enable a taxonomy globally for all organizations in an instance, or to set a list of organizations who can use the taxonomy.

Content Authors must be able to turn taxonomies (instance and org-levels) on/off at the course level.

Decision#

When is a taxonomy field shown to course authors in a given course?

tax.enabled

tax.enabled_for(course.org)

course enables all tax’s

Is taxonomy shown for course?

True

True

True

True

False

True

True

False

True

False

True

False

True

True

False

False

False

True

False

False

False

False

True

False

Course#

We will add a Course Advanced Settings that allows course authors to enable/disable all available taxonomies for a given course.

In order for a given taxonomy to be “available to a course”, it must be enabled in the Instance context and the course’s Organization context.

Disabling taxonomies for a course will remove/hide the taxonomy fields from the course edit page and unit edit page(s), and tags will not be shown in Studio for that course. LMS use of tags is outside of this MVP.

Future versions may add more granularity to these settings, to be determined by user needs.

Instance#

Taxonomy contains a boolean enabled field.

A Taxonomy can be disabled for all contexts by setting enabled = False. If enabled = True, then the Organization and Course contexts determine whether a taxonomy will be shown to course authors.

Organization#

OrgTaxonomy has a many-to-many relationship with the Organization model, accessed via the org_owners field. OrgTaxonomy lives under openedx.core.djangoapps.content_tagging and so has access to the Organization model and logic in Studio.

An OrgTaxonomy is enabled for all organizations if org_owners == []. If there are any org_owners set, then the OrgTaxonomy is only enabled for those orgas, i.e. only courses in these orgs will see the taxonomy field in Studio.

Allowing multiple orgs to access a taxonomy reduces redundancy in data and maintenance.

Rejected Alternatives#

Single org per taxonomy#

Having a single org on a taxonomy is simpler from an implementation perspective, but the UI/UX frames demonstrated that it is simpler for the user to maintain a single taxonomy for multiple orgs.

Course Waffle Flags#

Use Course Waffle Flags to enable/disable all taxonomies for a given course.

Waffle flags can only be changed by instance superusers, but the MVP specifically requires that content authors have control over this switch.

Changelog#

2026-04-02:

  • Added “Status”

  • Updated references to module paths