Categories in Articles

Still no update on this.

Most blogs are pretty useless without proper categories. The fact that articles still can't do this is poor.

I think it's better not use articles at all but to manually create your blog structure as used to be the case in modx.

I completely agree. However using standard Resources over Articles isn't going to help much, as neither have true support for multiple categories. (You could use TVs for either, but doing so would be slow). Articles 2.0 (or something better made from scratch) needs to have a custom table(s) with things like category and tag columns to make this possible.

Quote from: x0149128 at Apr 28, 2013, 02:12 PM

Still no update on this.

Most blogs are pretty useless without proper categories. The fact that articles still can't do this is poor.

I think it's better not use articles at all but to manually create your blog structure as used to be the case in modx.

The solution at the bottom of page 2 comes close, but no cigar.

I misunderstood how the Tag links are to work. I thought the links would create a new page based on the tag or category. Instead they take me to the blog index page; it's rather pointless.

Anyhow, I'd like to see Categories added to the 2.0 Roadmap. As it now I'm getting pressure to stick Wordpress into my MODX Cloud, guranteeing spam galore and the usual inelegant hassles that comes with WP. Ugh.

Quote from: ultrasef at Jul 23, 2013, 07:21 PM

... I misunderstood how the Tag links are to work. I thought the links would create a new page based on the tag or category. Instead they take me to the blog index page; it's rather pointless. ...

I have tags working as you'd expect - clicking one takes you to a page displaying all articles that are tagged with that tag. Let me know if you want to see code example...

This is an important topic for me, also. I'm currently in a situation where I'd happily use Modx as the CMS basis for any site I build, but instead I have to consider the blog functionality first. If the site I'm building and/or the users I'm building it for will benefit from being able to multi-categorise articles, and/or use hierarchical/nested categories, I immediately need to reassess and decide if WordPress is capable of handling the rest of the site functionality. If it is, I use WP. If it isn't I start considering compromises to the blog functionality, and if those aren't agreeable I have to consider using Modx for the main site, and bolting WPO on the side just for the blog page(s).

I manage one site I built using Evo a few years back, and it would benefit considerably by being ported across to WordPress because at present it's nothing more than a blog. I use Modx still because I'm planning a significant upgrade for which I plan to use Revo, but it's only my desire to add more functionality better suited to Modx that prevents me hopping over to WP to get better categorisation. At present my solution is to simply create weblinks in other categories (resource containers) and provide alternative URL aliases for each 'duplicate' article. It works fairly well, but it's a little untidy and it's not particularly slick from a management perspective. It's just fortunate that nobody else is helping my run the site [at the moment].

I'm confident I can essentially build WP using Modx - something I often tell fellow developers and users alike, but in reality everything boils down to blog categories as something Modx can't really emulate efficiently. The slap in the face (no offense to the modx developers or SplittingRed intended, of course) is the fact that there's an addon - Articles - which not only proposes a solution to make blogging easier, it also breaks out of the normal modx structure to remove articles from the normal resource tree (which seems rather backwards to me because the resource tree is one of the main advantages to modx, providing a much more manageable way to view hundreds or thousands of articles), yet *still* doesn't solve the only real problem modx had with blogging in the first place.

I'm perfectly content building a hierarchical category list using standard resource containers. From that perspective Modx can handle blogging just perfectly, until you want to put an article into a second category. I'm *almost* content using weblinks to achieve what I want, except it's very heavy handed. I wondered if symlinks would solve the problem, but while I don't fully understand the difference just yet, I've read enough to know that they probably aren't the ideal solution I was hoping for.

Perhaps something like a symlink, but for the express purpose of putting a single resource into multiple parent containers, with good UI. I don't have a perfect solution in mind. Every time I think it through I conclude that nothing short of a WP style tickbox list of hierarchical categories will do, so it may indeed need to be a dedicated feature for blogging and the like. A category TV layered on top of existing functionality. [ed. note: davidsmith last edited this post 10 years, 7 months ago.]

Quote from: lucy at Jul 23, 2013, 08:05 PM

I have tags working as you'd expect - clicking one takes you to a page displaying all articles that are tagged with that tag. Let me know if you want to see code example...

Lucy, I would love to see an example. I can only get 404 errors when I click on tags in my articles.
-Thanks

Rachel can you post your code here and I'll go dig out mine to compare.

Quote from: davidsmith at Oct 01, 2013, 09:38 AM

I'm perfectly content building a hierarchical category list using standard resource containers. From that perspective Modx can handle blogging just perfectly, until you want to put an article into a second category. I'm *almost* content using weblinks to achieve what I want, except it's very heavy handed. I wondered if symlinks would solve the problem, but while I don't fully understand the difference just yet, I've read enough to know that they probably aren't the ideal solution I was hoping for.

Perhaps something like a symlink, but for the express purpose of putting a single resource into multiple parent containers, with good UI. I don't have a perfect solution in mind. Every time I think it through I conclude that nothing short of a WP style tickbox list of hierarchical categories will do, so it may indeed need to be a dedicated feature for blogging and the like. A category TV layered on top of existing functionality.

I feel your pain. Articles hasn't historically had a whole lot of community contribution but I'd really like to change that. To be honest, I don't think the Roadmap has been updated since the project changed owners. It would be great to start a conversation with the community on what that Roadmap should be. So here is a Forum Post and a GitHub Issue to try and get that conversation going.

http://forums.modx.com/thread/87170/articles-2-0-new-roadmap#dis-post-480232
https://github.com/modxcms/Articles/issues/35

To answer your question about Symlinks, they are different in that they allow a Resource to inherit from another but do things like use another template. A weblink is simply a redirect to another resource. I used symlinks to create 'shop' pages for each product on this site:
http://www.sartoricheese.com/products/reserve-cheese/sarvecchio-parmesan/
http://www.sartoricheese.com/products/reserve-cheese/sarvecchio-parmesan/shop-sarvecchio-parmesan.html

The second link, is simply a symlink pointing to the first, and specifies a different template.

Quote from: lucy at Oct 14, 2013, 05:29 PM

Rachel can you post your code here and I'll go dig out mine to compare.

Thanks Lucy.... I ended up getting this to work for me after playing around for a few days.

My issue was that the Articles container is the site_start and therefore the URL that was being created was not correct. I was able to use info from other threads and get the Tags and Archives to work correctly, though for the tags I'm using using the tolinks tags, not the articles and in order to generate the correct URL

Isn't the simplesty way just to duplicate tags functionality to get Categories ?