[wp-hackers] Page Templates vs Category Templates

[Haluk Karamete]

with all due respect, Otto, if the web site talks about say breaking
news from countries all over the world, and it is all about that,
wouldn't you start with the continents at the top as your main nav and
be that driven by wp_list_categories?  And with one click, you are
down to the country names ( which are again the product of cats) .

I think you agree that it would make the best sense that we use the
cats as the main kicker for this type of site and there could be
hundreds of thousands of site where "noun" based categorizer be it all
the way at the top or at sub levels are just all over the place.
whether it is a bad or good practice, it is too late fix/teach/fight
against etc.

but yet, ( going back to the original idea of this thread ), we still
have no intuitive way and UI to sort out the layout need without
getting into the php code.

I understand that it is not a matter of if it could be done, and
rather it's an if it should be done.
but i thought this was a just slam dunk.





On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
> 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
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