I recently worked on a project where we needed something sort of like tagging, and sort of like categorizing – but neither really worked as there would be way too many exclude this and only show that stuff involved. I needed a way to classify certain content, have easy access to it, and display it in a manner that be effective and quick.
After exhausting all ideas – someone pointed me towards using “Custom Taxonomies” and it was a perfect fit.
What is a taxonomy? Simple – a way to group things. Why not use categories and or tags?
An example to better your understanding:
Right now – on this blog I use tags for my post themes (WordPress Wednesdays, etc). This is not ideal, because I am trying to group together posts by a particular theme, not necessarily by tags. Even though WordPress Wednesday could be seen as a key word – it is more a description or a classification of the post. What I plan to do in the next few days is to go back, create custom taxonomies for all my post themes and then use that for classification of posts instead of using tags. With this, I can then query them using query_posts or even make a tag cloud.
[php]
‘wordpress-wednesdays’, ‘showposts’ => 10 ) ); ?>
‘post_theme’, ‘number’ => 15 ) ); ?>
[/php]
Still confused? Check out the links below. Once you start thinking about organizing information, I think it will make sense.
References:
