[wp-hackers] Some Thoughts/Enhancement Ideas In And Around The Category Side Of Things

[Mark McWilliams]

Well you could say I was shot down in Trac earlier today! 
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12183

I know fine well this topic is brought up time and time again, in fact I was 
pointed towards talk that happened last year, which must mean that something 
really needs to be looked at, and I feel that what I'm thinking about could 
quite easily be built and/or expanded upon without much work required? :) 
I'm sure you'll soon tell me if I'm right or not!

So I'll dive straight in...

Parent Category: The idea behind the main category if you like, acts, or can 
act like a placeholder. Take any forum software for example, when you create 
a new section you have to decide if it'll just be a topic area, or an actual 
forum section? So in WP we introduce a new dropdown menu with a topic 
category option or a posting category if you like. (Are you following?)

Now because we'd have had the /category/ prefix removed from core, it'd show 
and work as follows!

Say we take this parent/topic category idea and with the name of BLOG, it'll 
have the slug of /blog/ and would show at  http://www.site.com/blog/ and 
like I mentioned above, you could decide if it'd just act as a topic for 
other categories, or if it'd be a main category itself?

Child Category: I'm sure most of you know how a 'child' or rather 
sub-category works, and really this is no different! This is looked upon as 
the actual category section, the one you can add a certain category too. Now 
if we take WORDPRESS NEWS as the category, it'd have /wordpress-news/ but 
being attached to the /blog/ topic, it'll now show up as 
/blog/wordpress-news/ which just looks way smarter without having the 
/category/ bit showing and looking out of sync with pages!

Another example could well be  http://www.site.com/blog/freebies/ which 
means the list can go on and on, but you get the picture?

You might argue that it's not much different than what we currently have at 
the moment, I'll admit, it's not, and with Custom Taxonomies and Custom Post 
Types you never know what can happen, they're only thoughts I have, not much 
more than that! =) The additional features that could be added to the 
category options would only help, in my opinion, become much more of a CMS.

In fact, for a little inspiration I'd take a look at WooThemes.com website 
who do this very well with the addition of a plugin (Top Level Categories), 
but then why should something as standard as this come down to a plugin, 
that not everyone knows about?

A couple of people did respond to the Trac Ticket, so do take a look at what 
they posted, and the replies I posted to them, of which I had a couple of 
questions... http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12183

What are your particular thoughts, how far should we go with regards to 
improving the category side of things, let the discussion begin.