[wp-hackers] Thoughts on Ultimate Tag Warrior

[Chris Williams]

To compare with printed media, categories are like the table of
contents, tags are like the index.  Both have value -- categories are
the author's way of saying: this is in this section; tags are raw lookup
for things the indexer (tagger?) thought you'd want to look for.

In fact, you could argue that Search is better than tags, I can look for
anything I want.  One could even say that tags are simply "suggestions
for searches".

I, like I think many people, have struggled to make categories fit my
needs.  Do I simply categorize like crazy (as one replier suggested) and
risk having a category list that is huge/impenetrable?  Or do I have a
sparse and useful category list (as another suggested) at the expense of
making things findable (if I don't use UTW or similar)?

I'd like to see the core code provide both a category and index (tag)
system.  As you suggested, this is a minor change to the base tables
(one field in the category table?).  I think the changes to the write
post interface could be made easily enough (one add'l field for tags).

But I recoil at making UI changes that use this system part of the core.
I find clouds to be a cute trick, but really not that useful.  Is it
that meaningful that some keyword is tagged 1,000 vs 10 times, if I'm
just trying to find that keyword?  It's neat for social sites where you
want to see what people are talking about, but is it that useful for
more informational sites?

I'd prefer an "index page" where I could search the index, then find the
references.  But that's just me.  This, to me, makes the
display/UI/presentation part of this question very much theme/plug-in
author territory.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Mullenweg
Subject: [wp-hackers] Thoughts on Ultimate Tag Warrior

Is there functionality UTW provides that we could do in core? (Clouds,
etc.)