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A Question on Organizing Categories and Tags
Written By Griffin on Jun. 27, 2007.
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Reading Ben's recent article on categories and tags brought up a nagging question I've always had, but have never explored. Is there a way in Wordpress, or any CMS, to make tags and categories interact with one another in a more hierarchical structure?
Suppose there's a lot of analogies you could use, but I've always thought of categories as a macro organizational tool and tags as micro. I thought it would be useful if the two could work in concert. For example, on an Archive Page a Category Named "Sports" could be further organized into tags such as: Boston Red Sox, Roger Federer, Nike, Camden Yards, Red Uniforms and so forth. Whatever tags you happened to apply to the category "Sports."
You could then choose to display a top tags list, which would be tags across all categories and/or you could choose to display tags broken down by category.
Not sure if a plugin exists, if it's already possible, or if you'd have to code it yourself, which would seem to be beyond me at the moment. Perhaps this is just a personal desire, but would this be useful, the ability to unite tags and categories in a more symbiotic, hierarchical relationship?
Could be I need to rearrange my perspective of tags. They just seem so chaotic and slippery. I've always wanted the ability to herd them more neatly, but don't know if it's possible, or desirable.
Tyme
Written Jun. 27, 2007 / Report /
No, I haven't seen anything like this. My one concern about this would be changing platforms. All of that information would be lost unless it became a standard.
I never understood why WP, EE, etc. didn't implement tags in the core of the CMS. Then something like this could definitely happen.
peroty
Written Jun. 27, 2007 / Report /
Within Textpattern there is a lot you can do with Sections and Categories using their hierarchical nature and "if" tags.
There's a lot you can do within each section to differentiate the conent from another section in how you handle it.
I know this is all very vague and I'm sorry for that. It's not really something I've ever looked into since I generally have a disdain for tags. There is a robust tagging plugin available which may be able to accomplish some of what you set out to do.
Just thought I'd throw my 2 cents in here.