[wp-hackers] Page Templates vs Category Templates

[Otto]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Haluk Karamete <halukkaramete at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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'd use a custom taxonomy for that, but I do get your meaning. Any
time you can come up with a bunch of "categories" which are all of the
same type of item (places, people, etc), then you've got a good case
for a custom taxonomy to group those descriptive terms together.

> 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.

My noun/adjective analogy is not a perfect one. What I mean by it is
that the posts are the "things" here, and the terms are what give some
kind of flavor to those things. Yes, "America" is a "noun", but if you
use it to describe something about a post, then it's really an
"adjective" in the sense that it's descriptive of that post's
content/type/category/flavor. Especially when you also have "China"
and "India" as other possible terms to add onto posts as well.

With a custom taxo, you can then call it, say, "place", and have
things like http://example.com/place/china to give all the posts about
goings-on in China. And so on. With multiple taxonomies, you could
even do something like
http://example.com/?place=china&person=ma-ying-jeou to describe stuff
happening in China that has to do with Ma Ying-jeou. It's feasible to
even pretty that URL up a bit, in whatever way you want to do that.

Custom Taxo's can have pretty UI's too. For the place taxo, you could
have it automatically create a new Meta box that lets you pick the
checkboxes, like the category picker does. And for the people taxo,
you could get a UI just like the Tag picker does, where you can type
in individual's names.

There is indeed room to work on the matter of theming and templating
for custom taxo's, I grant you.

-Otto