[wp-hackers] Achieving the custom taxonomy power with using only the standard cats and tags

[Haluk Karamete]

For this question, let's assume, that your clients wants to use only
the cats and the tags which comes with WP right out of the box.
and he do not plan on creating/maintaining any additional ( custom)
taxonomies. And he is interested in building a portal that is expected
to deal with ten's of thousands of posts across say a 50 category or
so - covering a wide range of topics.

And he wants the ultimate simplicity at post time.

The question is if there is a way to achieve what he wants without
sacrificing the quality as far as relational data quality.

With using only the cats and tags, no doubt he will have a very fast
way data entry. Maybe a 50 category is too much, but he can breake
that down to levels so that the top level is 10 or so....  However,
that's not the problem I'm interested in solving...  It's the problem
of tags', growing without context. The tag terms will not have any
perspective, leading to a tag soup. A tag such as Apple will match
posts not just from the computers category but also from the food
category - which absolutely makes no sense to the site visitors.

These says, I'm exploring a wild concept to see if a plug in could
work behind the scenes to bring a law and order to this process -
while keeping the data-entry as simple as possible/

For the sake of this question, let's create a hypothetical case,

Let's assume that one of the cats happens to be "food" category.

And here comes a post that deals with "apple".

we tag it as "apple" and we categorize the post under the "food"
category and and we move on. simply enough...

ten post down to road, here comes another post again about "apple",
but this time it is about the Steve Job's apple! We still tag it as
"apple" but this time, we categorize the post under technology
category. And that's all we do.

The problem becomes apparent when we display the food post along with
its corresponding tags.

We will get to see a link that shows as

Categories: Food
Tags: apple

And needless to say, when we click on the "apple" tag link, we will be
getting all the content tagged as apple regardless of the fact whether
it was related to food or not! This would lead frustration on the
user's part and resonate as an editorial failure as far as content
classification.

Sure, we could have avoided this problem by taxonomies or maybe by
tagging items as apple-computers, apple-food... but here, the client
does not want that, he is only interested in east content
classification.

I was wondering if the following can be done to remedy this situation.

Build a plug in.

At post saving time, let this plugin create a custom taxonomy on the
fly ( programmatically) matching the current category name that the
post is being associated with. if such a custom taxonomy were
existing, then it would skip the creation.

Plug in, also creates the necessary term to be associated with the
current custom taxonomy.

And if that term under that custom taxonomy were existing, again it
would just skip it.

So, in the above example, plug in will end up creating two custom
taxonomies that is food and technology and register apple under them
so we get the following associations;

/technology/apple
/food/apple


This approach will keep the content entry process still simple while
keeping the apple's in their own proper categories.

And at the time of display, right below the food post, we can still
display the post tag classification as

Tags: apple

but we can modify the link so that instead of linking to /tag/apple,
it would link to /food/apple/

This approach will also allow the content developer to grow various
subjects under various categories organically and thus have the
ability to show the most popular tags as sub categories.

For example, after 100's of posts, the tags growing under the
technology taxonomy can be shown as sub categories.

technology
    apple
    ibm
    hp
    ....

so what used to be entered as tag once will end up being presented as
a sub category and all this is achieved with an organic and effortless
style.

I'd like to hear your opinions on this.

Does such a thing already exists? What are the pro's and con's of this
approach? Or are there better ways you can suggest?