Slaying the Taxonomy Beast
You probably have noticed that I’m working on a major site overhaul (and loving the new theme!). Of course, with a different design comes a different relationship between style and substance; and for geeks like me that means a new taxonomy for categories, pages, and tags. My old design lent itself to a long, flat category list and unstructured pages; and didn’t feature the use of tags at all… the new design depends heavily on a coherent means of arranging these in hierarchy.
Making the project more complicated is the fact that I am importing content from my two non-profit domains into this one, each set of posts carrying it’s own taxonomy. I was faced with the overwhelming task of incorporating these bodies of information under a single set of categories, and those who’ve used Wordpress to categorize will know how tedious this could have become. I would have needed to open every single post individually to make that change.
Of course, that needs to be done anyway if I want to make thumbnails consistent throughout, but thumbnails in the archives has a different priority than site navigation… It’s important to get the data structured quickly, while per-post issues can be fixed on the fly. So I went searching for a plug-in. Who knew how difficult that would be? Tag and category management is obviously one of those needs that haven’t yet been fully met by the WP community.
It looked promising at first, but seems the change to 2.5 broke what little was out there. After much googling of various key phrases increasing in obscurity, I finally found this: “Batch Categories” by Rob Miller. The big bonus is that it controls tags too, not just categories, as well as searching content… so I can quickly whip my data into shape in one screen, the way it should be.
So I did what any blogger would subsequently do, I stopped working and started posting. The public has a right to know! That’s why you are seeing this blog, instead of the new navigation that will result from me actually making use of the plug-in that I have just installed. But that’s not the point… The point is, three cheers for “Batch Categories”, the plug-in that saved (or, rather, will save) my life! Hooray, hooray, hooray!!!
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