[wp-hackers] Customizing the view of custom taxonomies

[Mike Schinkel]

On Aug 1, 2010, at 5:39 AM, Scott Bressler wrote:
> I'm allowing users to attach their own custom metadata to posts, but this
> metadata is restricted to the terms added to the taxonomy I'm registering.
> For instance, a user can add a "due date" term to the taxonomy which is of
> type "date." Then on the post edit page I will allow them to select a date
> that will be saved I assume into postmeta. Separately, a user could add a
> "copy editor" term to the taxonomy of type "user" (of the blog). On the post
> edit page, a drop-down will be displayed allowing users to select which user
> of the blog is the assigned copy editor of the post.
> 
> Does that make more sense now?
> 
> Thinking more about this, it seems that taxonomies and terms don't store
> sufficient data, and I would still need to store information into postmeta.
> Should I still be leveraging terms and taxonomies, or should I just
> serialize the available metadata into a blog option field?

It sounds like you might want to use a non-hierarchical taxonomy which will behave like free-form tags to identify the available terms, and then use $wp_postmeta->meta_key and $wp_postmeta->meta_key to store the terms and their values on a per-post basis, right?  From a storage perspective that seems like a pretty workable solution based on your description.

However it's not yet obvious to me what an ideal UI would be; have you wireframed it/done a mockup? (Balsamiq works nice for that.) I think getting the UX design "right" may be harder than getting a plugin for WordPress to render it.  

-Mike