Comments on: Frustrating User Experiences: Wordpress Categories

By: Dave Johnson

Dave Johnson — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:33:28 +0000

Totally agree Dion! What is the point of tags and categories?

I was thinking about that the other day in fact. I have found a few problems with the new wordpress like not having the preview while you are writing.

At least inserting images is a bit easier.

By: dion

dion — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:51:05 +0000

joshnunn,

I can see how for some sites that can make sense. But, you could also have another way to say “these tags are main categories” and still have a one dimensional system.

By: dion

dion — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:47:52 +0000

Eric,

Yeah, being legacy users like us really changes the game doesn’t it. If we were starting again from today, it could be different :)

By: joshnunn

joshnunn — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:23:32 +0000

I recently trimmed my category list to only a handful, and re-categorised all my posts under a single category each. It was a long and painful process, but worth it. Now my visitors can easily separate site news from actual content etc, and my tags classify and extend the post for greater exploration. I hope they don’t trash it as readily as you suggest.

By: eric nakagawa

eric nakagawa — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:38:17 +0000

Hey dion,
I agree about finding all wp quirks the more you use it.

When they initially launched tags on wordpress.com I assumed it was targetted at us specifically… “Dog, cat,” in the example below the text box.

The issue for us had to do with finding wordpress before it supported tags, our only option was to use categories. Suggesting we changed, even though I knew we weren’t using the category feature properly we weren’t going to just switch.

Categories and tags both have similar functionality… For a regular user there’s no distinction. The wp team however views categories as a method for organizing posts, and tags for adding meta data about the post.

But in the end… Its still a pain in the ass updating both, or either. And they’ll need to educate users in order for them to remove one.

Eric abuser of cat-egories.