I have a lot of categories in this blog. 542, to be exact. I use them like tags, rather than a rigid hierarchy.
The WordPress Categories panel in the “Write Post” interface sucks with this many categories/tags. Having to scroll through a verrrrry long list to hunt for keywords is tedious. Here’s a screenshot of Drupal’s autocompleting text-entry interface, which makes it easy peasy to select existing categories/keywords and to add new ones all in one fell swoop. As you type keywords, an ajax call is sent to the blog, returning any categories that match the characters that have been typed, making it easy to select matches from a potentially infinite set of terms. This pattern is also used by del.icio.us very effectively.
Compare with WordPress’ infinite list of keywords, which involves scrolling through a neverending list of alphabetically sorted categories:
There has to be a way to replicate this in WordPress.
Entries (RSS)
Wordpress is adding tagging into their core, although it just missed getting into the 2.2 release. I don’t exactly what it will be like, but it might be what you are looking for. I recently went from 40+ categories down to 9 - I use Darren’s Related Posts plugin and tag files with tags which often correspond to the categories that I removed - I was using them like tages anyway.
Unfortunately there is still no autocomplete - it works for me, but it might not solve your problem.
It would definitely be nice to have some auto-completion! Then again, it took me forever to realize that I could type existing, comma separated tags into the UI as it stands… if only my memory were that good
@David: I’d seen the tagging support mentioned in the pre-2.2 blog posts by Matt and friends. That’s the reason I didn’t jump back into UltimateTagWarrior, which does a lot of this stuff quite nicely (if not WP-natively).
@Chris: wait - you can type existing, comma-separated categories into the field now? I didn’t even THINK to try that, since the button clearly says “Add” and I didn’t want to pollute my categories with duplicates. Nice. That’s close, but autocompletion would be sweet. Maybe now that WP 2.2 has an ajax library bundled with…
D’Arcy,
Agreed that the system isn’t working the way we want-
but, I have to tell you that categories in WordPress are Google Crack- if done well- it will get you to the top of search results and keep you there with minimal effort (if you have real content).
I don’t remember how I came upon your site so long ago- but, it’s been a great learning resource for me- thanks for continuing to post your thoughts.
I’m not sure how tags and categories are going to co-exist in WP 2.3, but, I’m sure that someone is working on a plugin to solve your problem as we speak.
@David: thanks. I see categories and tags as the same thing. All that’s needed is some UI love to let the category management interface scale. Things like avoiding infinitely scrolling lists, providing autocompletion, etc… It can all be Categories on the back end, with alternate ways to define, enter, and present the Categories as tags (or, as old-school hierarchical categories).
Drupal added it in 4.7 with the “free tagging” flag on a taxonomy, which changed the behaviour of that taxonomy when entering values on the node authoring page. It’s exactly the same as a regular taxonomy/category behind the scenes, though.
btw, I’m really glad I’ve got the email notification for comments again. Conversations via blog comments, oh, how I’ve missed that.
I’m glad you got the e-mail notification again too- much more “web 2.0″
I haven’t played with Ultimate Tag Warrior- which I thought you were using before.
The thing with tags is they are typically single words- while categories- and their definitions (you do go out and describe your categories, don’t you?) are generally longer- and if you’re smart, they are good search phrases.
The idea of tags as “meta data” is OK- but, I keep thinking somehow we have to get out of “words” into “concepts” or “collections of words that mean the same thing”- to describe data- the Google “did you mean ……” type interface- so it’s not just what we tag- but what everyone would-
I could tag it “pop” you could tag it “soda” and another might use “cola” and we’re all talking about the same thing.
I know it’s coming- eventually- but, right now, it’s hard to guess what the right words are to describe anything for everyone.
I’d been using Cat2Tag the last time I used WordPress, but it appears as though that’s now abandoned (the domain for the site is a parked adware holding site now). I used UTW before that, but didn’t like the non-standard storage it used (its own table, rather than as WP-native categories)
I’m not worried about Google juice. I use the tags to organize stuff so I can find it. If it’s useful to anyone else, or to Google, then so be it.
@Chris and D’Arcy: Like, D’Arcy, I’m moving away from UTW to simply using categories as tags. I did manage associating all my tags with categories through some SQL voodoo (and some help from some very very smart friends). I’ve tried using the “add” field to add categories as Chris suggests, but this has never worked for me. Is there some trick to getting this to work?
@jeremy: you have to click the “add categories” button before submitting the post. It ate a lot of categories for me until I figured this out. Silly WP…