[wp-hackers] Achieving faceted navigation

[Mike Schinkel]

On Dec 8, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Haluk Karamete wrote:
> but what about step 4? are u fine with that?
> 
> step 4 was this;
> ....
> What's the alternative to compare with?
> ....
> Basically, what we are doing here is to completely ignore category
> taxonomy from the get go and to the launch and use a custom taxonomy
> called topics as a replacement
> .....
> what i am saying, when going with this approach, from a
> coding and/or mind set point of view, are there any benefits at all?

If given a choice I'd go with the custom taxonomy because I like to reserve the otherwise too-generic "categories" for "Posts" ($post_type=='post').  

It seems to me that many people overuse  $taxonomy=='category' and then get into an issues of coupling where their categories for posts are different than their categories for other post types.  Unless semantically they are using the same categorization for those other post types, such as if all post types really are content items but different types of content and then category can be used as a major site structuring mechanism.   I'm working on a client project right now where the offshore team used category before I got on the project and they would have been better off having used a custom taxonomy instead.

Also, I think that most sites with 10 or more top level categories have too many:  

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/short-term-memory.html

Hope this helps.

-Mike