[wp-hackers] Page Templates vs Category Templates

[Otto]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 12:16 AM, Mike Schinkel
<mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:
> Imagine that instead of just having the URL root slugs /category/ and /tag/ and /2010/ baked into WordPress instead they were predefined "Pages" where the user could control the URL slug and add content such as intro text above the list of posts.

Isn't that what a custom taxonomy is?

I think there's some underlying preconceptions in this thread that
need to be addressed. For example, Haluk said "cats are the breads and
butter of the WP", which I would disagree with. Most people don't use
categories very well, often, or at all. Until we get post-formats,
cats are most often used to specify layout instead of to group posts
together and to provide a location for them in the URL structure. Most
sites I see (including my own) have very bad category structures.

Categories, frankly, just aren't that important in the grand scheme.
They're one (pre-defined) taxonomy out of many possible taxonomies.
The idea needs to be generalized.

More to the point though, categories, like tags, are not "things".
They are not nouns, they are adjectives. They don't have meta-data
because they *are* meta-data. So while yes, there's nothing
technically difficult about giving them their own template choice
boxes, it doesn't seem to be an effective use of the system. You'd
have to attach meta to meta, which doesn't make any sense. Adjectives
don't usually have their own adjectives.

In a sense, Pages and Page Templates can already sorta do what you're
suggesting. You could make a Page Template that displayed the page
content first, followed by some selection of Posts. That selection of
posts (what terms defined it) could be defined by some set of
meta-data attached to the Page itself, somehow. This basically fills
your requirements. It has its own URL, you can select the template for
it, you can define text...

There's a more generic idea here that I can't put my finger on yet.

-Otto