[wp-hackers] Link Subcategories

[Stuart]

I was involved in a discussion a while back about the differences
between categories and tags. My own opinion is that categories and
tags serve different purposes: categories are used to group posts
together in a logical, structural way, whereas tags are used for
describing the posts in a more free-flowing method. (Wikipedia says it
best: "Tags can be used to specify properties of an object that are
not obvious to the object itself")

In a Wordpress site, categories are often used as a navigational tool
to allow you to group your posts into different sections, e.g.
Politics, Tech, Sports, etc. However, when you combine this with
tagging, you can keep your distinct sections of the site separate with
categories, but then also provide tags which describes each post and
allows deeper searching and linking between posts.

The same concept can be applied to Flickr, which allows you to group
your photos into sets, but also tag each photo with as many tags as
you want. So you can group all your holiday photos from Rome together,
while still be able to bring up a page with all the photos tagged with
'museum'.

I currently use Ultimate Tag Warrior for this, but I would much rather
have the basic tag functionality built into the Wordpress core. Then
plugin authors could build on this by creating tag cloud plugins and
the such.

That doesn't really have anything to do with the original message in
this thread, so sorry if it's off topic - I'm just continuing with the
comment that Craig made above about how categories are being treated
more as tags.

Cheers - Stuart.



On 4/6/06, Craig <nuclearmoose at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was discussing this in #wordpress earlier today. It seems that part of the
> rationale is in making the code that much simpler, and the other is to move
> WP away from categories and essentially having a tag system which offers a
> lot more flexibility.
>
> I don't claim to know this to be the truth or 100% correct, but that is what
> I got out of the talk. On my own blog, I've never conceived of bookmark
> categories and post categories to be shared in any way. That's just how my
> mindset works; perhaps this new way will offer me some advantages that I
> don't yet understand.
>
> Regardless, I'm reserving judgement on this until I understand better the
> pros and cons of the changes. For now, it simply makes my list of categories
> a lot longer and I have to be a bit more diligent to select the correct
> category (tag?).
>
> Craig.
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