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

[Otto]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Haluk Karamete <halukkaramete at gmail.com> wrote:
> Cleanly written that's basically
> ------------------------------------
> People: Politicians, Obama
> ------------------------------------
> where both Politicians and Obama is clickable to pull the proper posts
> under the proper context. that's all there is to it. isn't it?

But that's a matter of how you display things, not a matter of
internal organization. If you want to have your theme/plugin/code
display items from both people-group and people in the same line, you
can do that. But you wouldn't want them in the same taxonomy, because
they are not the same type of things.

If you're just going to throw a bunch of random things into a taxonomy
without an organizational principle behind it, then why have separate
custom taxonomies at all?

> It made sense to
> me to  implement it so that all the developer does is to crete a
> hierarchial taxonomy called People and then throw proper terms under
> it such as "Politicians","Musicians" etc and whenever he needs to tag
> a post (with say M. Jackson, he goes straight into the
> People/Musicians taxonomy, and  clicks on the musicians, lets the WP
> open the textbox, and tags the item(s) such as
> M.Jackson,R.Stewart,Madonna in one go like that. I thought, with that
> approach, hw would end up doing 2 things in one shot.

That's a matter of UI, like you stated before. And I would have
Musicians and Politicians and such as separate taxonomies. Perhaps
with taxonomy meta data you could group the separate taxonomies
together somehow for a user interface. We don't taxonomy-meta yet, but
there's no real reason you couldn't make another taxonomy to group
those taxonomies, if you really wanted to do something like that. Or
use an option. Or whatever makes the most sense for your
implementation.

> So, it is a UI issue. But I think it is a benefit to all.
>
> Agree?

It seems *really* custom to me. I'm not seeing a lot of wide use-cases
here for it. But custom taxonomies are relatively new too, so we'll
have to see how they get used in the long term.

-Otto