BruceHartman.net

I’m really beginning to hate the merging of post categories and link categories into a single category pool. The fact is, post categories are different from link categories, and you’ll have a hard time convincing me otherwise.

When I refocused my energy on BHN, I made a decision to nest all of my categories. For instance, as far as posts go, “Journal” is the topmost category and all others are children. There are even children of the children, as in, Journal > Artwork > Paper Mache (Paper Mache being the child of Artwork, which is the child of Journal). My reasoning is that I wanted to be able to reference a single category and return every post in the database without having to tag every post with its “normal” category as well as the Journal category.

I do the same thing with respect to Links. Right now I have Blogroll as the uppermost category (as of this writing there are only three child categories… with no grandchildren). Same thing here, I want to be able to reference a single link category and pull the whole list without having to tag a link with multiple categories (which isn’t even possible).

The other added benefit here is that this technique segregates the different types of categories on the “Manage Categories” admin panel.

To my way of thinking there should be a flag or flags in the database table that turn on whether a category is available for posts, links, or both. And if the category is available for both types of items, you should also have the ability to enable a parent category for each type of item. For instance, I want an Artists category for posts I might write about artists I find online, as well as a category for Artists I might link in my blogroll. For that matter, it’s not unheard of to allow a category to have multiple parents. Even disregarding my initial reasoning for nesting all the way up to Journal and Blogroll, respectively, multiple parents (or at least two) would provide further organizational options that would extend Wordpress’ ability to be adapted for things people haven’t thought of yet.

What’s confusing to me is that the possibility (actually, likelihood) currently exists that a category can contain posts and links, as is evidenced by the “Manage Categories” admin panel showing an item count column for both posts and links. Wordpress recognizes that there is a difference between the two item types. Further evidence is that there are two category defaults.

It seems to me that the category merger was an interesting idea that wasn’t necessarily carried out as far as it should have been. Hopefully I can impress these ideas upon the development team and maybe they’ll incorporate them into future releases.