[wp-hackers] hierarchical custom taxonomies vs good & old cats.

[Otto]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Haluk Karamete <halukkaramete at gmail.com> wrote:
> No Nacin, That wasn't what I was referring to. sorry it wasn't
> clear... here is the attemp2...
>
> Tags ( the built-in tag's I'm taking about ) is open ended. If I
> create a tag called say "apple", there is no context. Is it the
> computer apple? Is it the fruit apple? But If were to create
> taxonomies "fruits" and "computers",  I would have had the choice of
> inserting the word "apple" under the fruits taxonomy without mixing
> and matching, well, apples and oranges. ( what a confusing expression
> to refer to. )
>
> So, when I create a tag cloud for the fruits taxonomy, clicking on the
> word "apple" under the fruits cloud , that click woud never pull the
> Apple inc. stuff.  but, that's old business, the non-hier taxonomies
> already allow you to do this.
>
> So where is the problem?
>
> The problem is, that i lose all that power if I were choose to
> configure the fruits taxonomy to be as hierarchical.
>
> Because with a hierarchical taxonomy, I no longer add the word
> "apple", the same way I did with the non-hierarchical case. At this
> point, my two options are either to add the "apple" into the tags
> taxonomy as a good & old tag, or create an "apple" term and make its
> parent id Fruits. But then at this point, the system starts behaving
> exactly like the good & old cats.
>
>  if I were to create  2 groupings under the fruits taxonomy for
> example as "multi-color fruits", and I wanted to add the comma
> separated list "apple, grape, berry" under the "multi-color fruits" in
> one go. I cannot. That's the problem.
>
> In this example, the apple, grape stuff is screaming to be added as
> tag items. But, they end up getting into as children of "multi-color
> fruits", one at a time where at each time you need the point the
> parent ID, exactly like the way cats work, not the way tags work.
>
> sorry for the long expression but there yo have it.
> I don't know if I was able to make the point clearer now?
>
> The ideal ( and the most natural ) solution would be one that gives me
> the power to do this;
>
> step 1
> create fruits taxonomy, make it hierarchical.
>
> step 2
> create a term called "multi-color fruits" under the fruits taxonomy.
>
> step 3
> when you are adding a post and you want to tag it as apple, and also
> as berry ( just because the post is talking about a recipe which only
> uses apple and berries), you put a checkbox on the "multi-color
> fruits" and then add the apple and berry in a comma separated way in
> one go as apple,berry into another text box in the WP UI ( which is
> currently not available).
>
> the benefits of having something like this is this; it only extends
> the power of custom taxonomies by giving them the tag grouping power
> to its any level groupings.
>
> so that when my visitors are on that recipe page,
>
> they would be seeing something like this
>
> Fruits:     multi-color fruits, apple, grape
>
> where clicking on "multi-color fruits" will bring the posts that has
> been assigned to "multi-color fruits" which may bring posts that's
> been tagged not only by apple and grape but also berries.
>
> and where clicking on "apple" will bring only those posts that has
> been tagged with apple, while excluding the Apple Inc. related posts
> that have also been tagged as "apple".

I didn't really understand that, but now I'm hungry for some reason. ;)


So your basic issue here is that you want hierarchical like
categories, but the ability to insert terms at-will like tags?

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, really, because if you can
insert them at-will, then there's no hierarchy inherent to them. Even
if you assume that you can check a box to define a parent for your
at-will terms, that's more limiting than categories because I can
assign categories from different parents to the same post.

In other words, this sounds like either a misapplied design problem or
a user-interface issue.

More to the point, how would this theoretical hierarchy that you can
create on the fly be useful? What value is there to having a hierarchy
on tags, for example? What would you use it for?

-Otto