Wayne Liew has written a post about making best use of the categories on your blog. He makes the point that the new year is a perfect time to take a look at your categories, that may have expanded significantly over the years, and clear them out.
I have been doing something like this today. I have just migrated a blog that was running on an old version of WordPress and part of that meant re-writing a plugin I wrote more than a year ago.
This plugin is designed to allow posts to be displayed that fall into two categories; for example:
A wine blog might well sort wines according to region, California, France, New Zealand, etc. and within that into red, white, rose, sparkling, etc.
having a URL that will filter according to two categories, i.e. /categories/California/red/ seems to make a lot of sense in this situation.
It was written for a specific blog and so I stopped at two, but in reality there is no reason why it shouldn’t allow three, or even four categories.
It is possible to use subcategories to achieve this kind of thing, however, it can start to get complicated.
If anyone is interested in obtaining a copy of the plugin, then let me know and I will make it available. In the meantime I am interested to learn what kinds of category structures you are using on your own blog. Mine is fairly straightforward at the moment but I am considering using multiple category filters, asides, and a few other things in 2008.
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It took me a little bit but I uploaded the plugin lat night:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fun-with-categories/
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Great ideas for categories, we’ll look for the plug-ins. Terry McDonald
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Clear, you can see what I built the plugin for at http://www.rickmann-uk.com. This is my parents travel site and they wanted to order posts by country, and then sort by whether it was a journal entry, a photo entry, or a list of facts.
I will publish the plugin shortly, I just need to go through it and make sure it is release ready.
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Andrew – we have a unique structure to our categories that was developed for us that has really helped our readers experience – I’d love to see yours in action – there are a lot of real estate blogs that may be able to use your plugin – Glad Michael Martine helped me find your blog. – Cyndee Haydon
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At some point I certainly will do in a few weeks when I have the time to write up the readme file.
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Thanks for the linkback.
Hmm, its good to have such plugin which can provide better organization of posts.
Why don’t you try making it public via Weblog Tools Collection since I am very sure that someone out there will need it very much. ;-)