My introduction to CSS, PHP and pseudo-CMS options via WordPress came entirely by chance. I had experimented with Joomla (then Mambo) in the past, but as a whole, it was simply too feature-ridden for a new-comer such as myself.
It became obvious quite quickly that I needed a publishing platform that:
- installed quickly and easily
- had a lot of 3rd party plugins to fill in any gaps
- a vocal and helpful community to help me past any roadblocks
One of the first things you notice after a fresh WP installation is the “blogroll” area (always hated that name, p.s.), a pre-filled list of the original bloggers/friends of WP creator Matt Mullenweg. The real score for me finding Michael Heilemann’s blog and discovering all the hoops he made his installation jump through. For those who think they aren’t familiar with his work, you already are. He is responsible for Kubrick and K2, the default themes for the past several years.
After some struggling wrapping my mind around “The Loop,” I came to love WordPress and the easy to use custom page templates. The problem is that in truth, WordPress was never made to be a CMS. It has always given preference to time-sensitive content like posts, and static “pages” feel like second class citizens (try loading the “manage>pages admin area” with more than 20 pages. Painful). And WP is trying to change this. They enabled features like a default start page via the admin panel rather than making you hack up a home.php file, and finally introduced native tagging in version 2.3. And now we arrive at the topic of morning.
Categories were, as far as I can tell, originally meant to handle posts like an index handles chapters. Contained within “Journal” are all my personal posts, and contained within “Portfolio” are all posts containing specifically styled work content. The problem is that a blog is never finite like a book. Its content is constantly updating, changing focus, gaining breadth of knowledge and experience. Categories are unwieldy and resistant to dynamic growth. Which is where tags come in. Using an interface lifted directly from the popular “Ultimate Tag Warrior” plugin, WP2.3 users are now able to “categorize” the content of those posts the way it always should have been - on a post by post basis. The dynamic tag cloud is a thing of beauty, and you don’t have to sift through a list of 400 categories everytime you go to update your site. But tags still aren’t at the forefront. They are displayed like a secondary organization system rather than the clear improvement on categories.
Now don’t get me wrong, I still use categories as mentioned above. But I use them as a hack. A way to force WordPress to give me two distinct areas of the site. The content is actually related, but their display is not. I use tags as an on the fly sorting system on the left of every post, and it works great! And I’m left wondering: Do I really still need to see the categories pane on the right of every edit window?
Expression Engine (a CMS I’ve started using recently) doesn’t have the robust tagging system that WP now enjoys, but it uses categories the way I expect them to be used, as a way to organize the groups of pages in your site, or entire “blogs.”
I think WordPress needs to make up its mind as to whether it is purely a blogging system or a true CMS with a clean and simple interface. These days, much of “WordPress as a CMS” feels like a giant hack, but it is changing. The distinctions are appearing, but with remnants of their history, vestigial organs that no longer apply to the areas they occupy. If I had one wish for 2.4, it would be better treatment of pages, equal to that of posts. And -IMHO- the death of categories in the manage>post area. They are clearly so much more than that.
But these are just the thoughts of one wacky WordPress enthusiast. How do you use categories v.s. tags? Please enlighten me via a comment.
There’s no reason on god’s green earth that a CMS shouldn’t just go through your post and categorize it for you. Summarization software is old news. OLD NEWS.
Plus, I’m not quite sure why, with a good search engine, you would need to categorize anything anyway. Why not just leave it in a Newton soup and let the work all happen on the back end?
Adding in all that metadata is a problem that should have been thought out by now, because frankly there’s just too much content for everyone to run around and tag every file they’ve ever made all at once. For the same reason that there are email rules, there will be automatically generated meta for video and audio. When you think about that, blogs seem like basic arithmetic in a calculus world. In fact, this was something I was exposed to in a small business way back in 2000.
To solve this problem, you need to do one of two things: go outside and ride your tricycle around until a solution becomes a standard, or stay put and invent the damned thing so the rest of us can use all that tagging time sucking on lollipops. For that matter, do you really blog so much that you need 10 categories per post to go back and find what you need?