Modx Blog Categories

Hey all, I’m in the process of setting up my site in modx, I’m actually switching over from wordpress. I have been thinking of ways to implement complete blog taxonomy i.e. categories and tags. I know you can use ditto and template variables to implement tagging, but I haven’t come across a satisfactory solution for categories yet.

I know you can create a list or checkbox tv for categories and then create container documents for each category. The problem with this solution is automation, I am not very conversant with the modx api but it seems like it might be possible to create a plugin which inspects the category tv and creates containers with corresponding dittto calls. Another issue would be adding category names as prefixes to post aliases.

Is it possible to add a paramter to ditto (ie category) which can be passed via urls just like with tags?

Any thoughts on these or any other solutions?

Simply make each category a container/folder in the tree heirarchy and have Ditto pull from multiple parents. It’d be simple and automatic. Or do you need a single post in multiple categories?

Quote from: rthrash at May 19, 2009, 01:25 PM

Simply make each category a container/folder in the tree heirarchy and have Ditto pull from multiple parents. It’d be simple and automatic. Or do you need a single post in multiple categories?

Yeah I would like to allow for single posts with multiple categories and possibly automate the creation of category folders

I’d suggest save your blog post in one container/folder
and then categorize using tagging + the REQUEST extender URLs
http://ditto.modxcms.com/extenders/request.html

In Snippet call ... &tagMode=`onlyAllTags` &tagData=`categoryTV,regularTagsTv` &tags=`[*categoryTV*]` &extenders=`request` ...

Then for categorizing links < a href="[~[*id*]~]?ditto_tags&#61;[*categoryTV*],[*regularTagsTv*]">Category - Tag</a>

This if you set category and tags for a blog posts back-end through TVs

If you doing blogging front-end you could use &tagData=`description,introtext` which NewsPublisher and NewsEditor snippets can
update... Test it out.

//Request with or without furl
Friendly url [~[*id*]~]?...
Regular url [~[*id*]~]&

thanks @mrhaw I’ll try that