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#13 2025-06-11 08:22:00

Bloke
Developer
From: Leeds, UK
Registered: 2006-01-29
Posts: 11,809
Website GitHub

Re: WordPress theme file editing

Algaris wrote #339856:

If I may also add unlimited article categories to the list too.

We’ve back and forthed on this for ages. The category1 and category2 concept is so ingrained in tags, conditional logic and core code that we almost always decide to leave it as it is.

One thing we did posit was to repurpose the, now defunct, keywords field as Tags (although we probably need a better name for it because it gets confusing with us calling txp: tags Tags! I can imagine the documentation… Use the <txp:tags> tag to display a list of tags…). Those would act, essentially, as unlimited categories that you could filter by.

And my plan was to offer the ability to synonym too, which blows search into the stratosphere. Imagine searching for articles about the keyword/tag property that shows you those results first, then moves on to list results that also contain properties and house and houses and flats and apartments because you’ve said they all belong to the same group. Handy. Using quotes around a search term or forcing exact match in some way would bypass this extended synonym filter.

The downside is that keywords are currently article-centric so they’d need extending to other content types.

Not entirely sure how this will end up. We may just make a clean break and revamp categories since Txp 5 isn’t shackled by such stringent backwards compatibility constraints (although as always, we’ll do our best to migrate people automatically).


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#14 2025-06-11 13:19:26

colak
Admin
From: Cyprus
Registered: 2004-11-20
Posts: 9,174
Website GitHub Mastodon Twitter

Re: WordPress theme file editing

Bloke wrote #339857:

We’ve back and forthed on this for ages. The category1 and category2 concept is so ingrained in tags, conditional logic and core code that we almost always decide to leave it as it is.

I used to like to have more categories but from the time that they have been part of deep url structures (site.tld/section_name/category1_name/category2_name/article), I think that their function was upgraded in a major way.


Yiannis
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I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.

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#15 2025-06-13 15:15:42

Algaris
Member
From: England
Registered: 2006-01-27
Posts: 578

Re: WordPress theme file editing

Bloke wrote #339857:

We’ve back and forthed on this for ages…

Thank you for the explanation. It made it interesting reading. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for unlimited categories for maybe one day in the future.

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#16 2025-06-13 18:44:29

Vienuolis
Member
From: Vilnius, Lithuania
Registered: 2009-06-14
Posts: 317
Website GitHub GitLab Mastodon Twitter

Re: WordPress theme file editing

Yes, the classification on Textpattern is done correctly and cleanly. There is no need to expand the number of categories really, it would become a mess and pollution. Unlimited meta keywords (index subjects, tag labels) are used to mark features instead — which are essentially different from categories. A category is a field of knowledge, the subject of a message, just as a UDK taxonomy class is. Therefore, there should be only one category. Or two, but the second one is just a further specification, narrower than the general first one. Whereas many keywords (marks) can be assigned to a single thing — as many as there are features of that thing that need to be tagged.

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#17 2025-06-13 22:42:55

bici
Member
From: vancouver
Registered: 2004-02-24
Posts: 2,122
Website Mastodon

Re: WordPress theme file editing

Unless I have misunderstood the issues in Textpattern, I am not sure that the two –– category and meta keyword –– have the same usage or application

In ExpressionEngine this feature of multi categories is very useful.

For Keywords.


…. texted postive

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#18 2025-06-13 22:47:44

Bloke
Developer
From: Leeds, UK
Registered: 2006-01-29
Posts: 11,809
Website GitHub

Re: WordPress theme file editing

Forget meta keywords. I only mentioned them because one idea was to revamp them into semi-structured, synonymable, filterable tags. In that guise, they become a bit like categories. A bit… insofar as you can assign as many as you like to an article and filter by one or more to find content.


The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.

Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp

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#19 Yesterday 18:32:59

Vienuolis
Member
From: Vilnius, Lithuania
Registered: 2009-06-14
Posts: 317
Website GitHub GitLab Mastodon Twitter

Re: WordPress theme file editing

So you are going to abolish the categories, rename meta keywords as categories and make them fully fledged, are not you? I do not disagree, categories are rarely necessary, your smd_tags are much handier. Just remember that general search is more accurate and effective with unlimited custom keyword queries, whereas meta tags serve a different purpose.

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#20 Yesterday 18:44:08

Bloke
Developer
From: Leeds, UK
Registered: 2006-01-29
Posts: 11,809
Website GitHub

Re: WordPress theme file editing

Vienuolis wrote #339872:

meta tags serve a different purpose.

Hence I said forget about meta keywords. They’re defunct and we already have some of the infrastructure to display lists of keywords (aka “tags”) so the rough plan was to repurpose that field. To avoid confusion between Txp: tags and data tags that act as filters, I’m going to use the term keytags.

This is already straying waaaay off topic…

But I’d move keywords out of the Meta block into its own keytags group and beef it up. Allow keytag management and synonyming, then add keytag search/filter capability to the article txp: tags. And introduce some Txp: tags to generate lists of keytags and conditionally act on values passed via the URL – a bit like categories (and smd_tags) do.

I wasn’t intending to get rid of categories. It affects too many tags, url schemes, plugins and code. If people want simple categorisation, use them. If they want something more advanced, use keytags. Or a mixture.


The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.

Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp

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