[wp-hackers] Editing a tag also edits a matching category

[kingler]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 2:38 AM, Callum Macdonald
<lists.automattic.com at callum-macdonald.com> wrote:
> G'day,
>
>  When you edit a category, you are actually editing the term and not the
>  taxonomy. This means that if you have a category and a tag with the same
>  underlying term, things can get out of sync.
>
>  The simplest example is regarding case. If you create a post and tag it
>  "photos" then create another post and add a category "Photos", the
>  category will be called "photos" because that's the name of the existing
>  term with the same slug. If you edit that category and change it to
>  "Photos" then the tag will also be changed to "Photos". Likewise, if you
>  decide to edit a category slug, it will edit the slug of the
>  corresponding tag (if the tag exists), and vice versa.

This is definitely a bug. Have you reported in Trac?

>
>  I think this is a fundamental bug in the term / taxonomy system. I've
>  been looking through the code in some detail recently (doing some stuff
>  on WPMU) and I've come to the conclusion that tags and categories are
>  fundamentally different. For example, in WPMU, tags can easily be used
>  globally, while categories cannot. Categories have descriptions and
>  parents which might be different on each wpmu blog, tags do not.

The categories/tags are just special kinds of taxonomy. However, like you said,
categories do have relationships (parents) between them more than tags do.

For WPMU, to achieve global category is a bit tricky, but you can simply map
every blog to use a single blog's category... We do run a system
similar to that.
If you don't care about relationships between categories, just treat
them as tags
at the global level, which is what WordPress.com is doing...

>  I'm not proposing anything at this point. I'm keen to explore what other
>  people think on the subject. Anyone have an opinion to share?
>
>  Cheers - Callum.
>

-Liang
kingler from 72pines