On Sep 29, 2005, at 5:00 PM, Elias Torres wrote:
Excellent research Dave. I'm really struggling to believe that people
make good use of hierarchies when it comes to categories. I hate
taxonomies for that matter too (I know I'll regret saying this). Did
you guys get a big push to add hierarchies by the community?
No we really didn't. I saw hierarchies in Bloxsom and Blojsom plus I
saw hierarchical categories as a way create separate blogs within one
blog. For example, my main blog would be under category /blog/* and my
linkblog would be under /linkblog/*. I actually had that working, then
we ran into problems with my Hibernate/Castor query-wrappers, we ported
from HSQL queries to Hibernate Query API and we lost recursive queries.
I think there is a patch in JIRA to restore recursive queries. I'd
like to see them back in Roller because without recursion, hierarchical
cats are almost useless.
Is hierarchy the fundamental difference between categories and tags?
What can you do with tags that Roller categories don't allow? Assign
multiple tags to each blog entry. Create new tags on the fly. Easily
query for tags across multiple blogs. We could modify Roller
categories
to allow those things and be more like tags.
So far I see three options:
1) Complete categories by allowing multiple and add tags too
2) Replace existing category (and bookmark folder) code with tags
3) Refactor and rework existing category system so that it acts like
tags
3) sounds a lot like 2) as I understand it. Refactoring would mean you
don't need to have categories created before using them (meaning tags)
and that would also mean removing the hierarchical nature of
categories, so in the end we would just have tags as 2).
Before choosing between 1 and 2 I'd like to get your opinion if this
has a chance of being included in 2.0.
I think it's too late for 2.0.
Elias: how many of your users are using multiple categories?
- Dave
