[wp-hackers] to use or not to use a custom taxonomy

[Haluk Karamete]

Mike,

That could be any hierarchy that provides a different facet into the
content. I was imagining that the first 10 cats are the categorization
of one facet and the final one ( the one that was being questioned  to
 be  implemented as a CT ) is another facet. An example could be
something like this...

when the top ten cats are as follows;
*   topic1
*   topic2
*   topic3
..
*   topic10
which could be stuff like sports, politics, entertainment... they are
part of basically form a group of a topic based categorization. Let's
call it topic based facet, and this would allow the site to be browsed
by topic.

and the 11th cat, ( the one that I was asking about whether it should
be implemented as another cat, or a CT ) would be looking at things
from another point of view (say media), so that the site could be
browsed by media type. in that case, it could be sub categorized as
follows

video
audio
article
application
animation

Now the question is, would you create a CT and name is at Media and
then create these 5 under it as subs...

or

just create another category right after the topic10 and call it
topic11 ( that is media ) and tuck 5 more underneath it as 11.1 being
video... 11.5 being animation etc.

the issue of treating the cat 11 differently is due to the different
nature of the cat11.

when you display the cats, of course, you would not want to display it
as politics, sports, entertainment and then boom media (cat11)...
why? cause media is a whole different facet...

we can extend this to another facet, for example audience...  which
lets site to be browsed by the proficiency level of the user as well..
  let's say we now need to consider topic12 or perhaps another CT
called Audience. And we break it down by beginner, intermediate and
advanced...

again, you would not want to display it as politics, sports,
entertainment and then media and then audience... the media, the
audience and the first ten belongs to different sets... different
facets...

here what I'm trying to understand is.... as I create more and more
CT's, my JOINs will be slower and slower...  so should I stay away
from creating CT's after CT's just because it makes more sentence for
them to be as CT's ?... should I concern about the speed and implement
an the alternative way of achieving the same thing by strictly using 1
taxonomy that is category? For a small blog or one that do not have a
big hierarchy, these questions don't matter much. but the more the
hierarchy, the more these questions become...  eventually each of
these would lead top its own "landing page" where you need to do lots
of filtering from various facets...  for example, breaking the
politics category by audience and media facets...  or breaking it
videos facet by topics and audiance... when we create those loops
speed would be a matter to question.. it just looks to me if you never
create CT's, you are just better of with speed!  Again, this is based
on the Otto's article that I referred above..  In that article, hw
wasn't saying to never use CTs but speed wise,  I understood that it
is better to stick to less taxonomies...

may be the right question I'm trying to ask, in a highly complicated
web site with 5000 videos, 20,000 articles, 1M plus visitors where
visitors are from all knowledge levels ( beginner/intermedia/advanced)
and so on....  what guide does the information architect use in
deciding when to use CT's and when not to - where we know the CT that
you are trying to create can just as well be implemented as another
top level category whose display is managed properly.





On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 3:23 PM, Mike Schinkel
<mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:
> On Oct 30, 2011, at 12:58 PM, Haluk Karamete wrote:
>> say Joe is in need of creating 10 top level categories plus 1
>> hierarchical custom taxonomy to have 5 sub-categories under it.
>
> Can you clarify what you mean by a custom taxonomy with 5 sub-categories?  Do you mean a custom taxonomy like "Color" with "Red", "Green", "Blue", "Yellow" and "Cyan" or do you mean something else?  (Providing example data would really help.)
>
> -Mike
>
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