Articles 2.0 New Roadmap

Well it seems to me you've just answered your own question. Tags aren't a bad substitute for categories in more simple cases, but it should be noted that WordPress supports tags also, so they shouldn't be considered interchangeable in their respective contexts.

To add more perspective, consider how you'd manage a *hierarchical* menu of tags, front and back-end. If you find a solution you've got categories and this debate seems as redundant as you imply. As that's not the case, and there's as much reason for tags *and* cats in modx as there is in WP, the circle appears to begin again.

Either way this appears to be a case not of debating the issue, but fully understanding it. There's really no talking around the obvious advantage WP has in the article categorisation department. If you're happy without it, congratulations. [ed. note: davidsmith last edited this post 10 years, 3 months ago.]

OK, so I see your point about hierarchical categories. None of my clients have needed that, not even ones I've set up on WordPress, so I've never considered that a pressing need.

That being said, I think the best thing would be for someone to develop a "hierarchical" input type for TVs. Why limit this to just Articles? It could be useful for other types of resources as well. I'm a big fan of keeping things modular (the "mod" in MODX) so we can plug them in wherever we want.

That's more like it. Totally agree. I didn't much like the idea of the Article extension, not only because I don't want 'list view' to be obligatory, but also because we really should be working to the strengths of modx, in this case modularity.

Surely categories could be implemented as a basic extension of tags. Modx is keeping track of tags used. Add hierarchy management and it's done, no?

Is this any use to you? It's a recent Extra called TagManager. Currently in Russian and not much documentation.
http://modx.com/extras/package/tagmanager

I'd like to third this. Let's make things generic and not embedded in an artificial bundle like Articles.

Enhanced categorization would help lots of projects, not just blogging, such as a shop.

Quote from: dinocorn at Dec 17, 2013, 07:59 AM

There is Grid Class Key by goldsky:
https://github.com/goldsky/GridClassKey

as well as Containers by modxcms:
https://github.com/modxcms/Collections

The problem with both of these, which is still a problem with Articles as well, is that, as far as I can see, there is no way to specify the default field and order to sort the list by in the Manager. With Articles, you can set the field in the global system variables, but not per individual Articles container, and there is no way to have it sort ascending by default. [ed. note: rainbowtiger last edited this post 10 years, 3 months ago.]

Quote from: eladnova at Jan 01, 2014, 08:28 PM

Is this any use to you? It's a recent Extra called TagManager. Currently in Russian and not much documentation.
http://modx.com/extras/package/tagmanager

That doesn't seem to do what we're looking for. It seems to arrange the categories applied to TVs, rather than create a TV type that can display hierarchical values.

Quote from: davidsmith at Jan 01, 2014, 07:33 PM

Surely categories could be implemented as a basic extension of tags. Modx is keeping track of tags used. Add hierarchy management and it's done, no?

Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Rather than adding to the existing Articles data model, a new one with scalability and category support would like need to be architected from scratch.

Could it be done by just adding an article_category table and an articleCategory object with two fields, 'id' and 'category' ('id' being the ID of the Article and 'category' being the category name)? That would give you a many-to-many relationship between Articles and Categories.

It wouldn't necessarily have to be a related object of anything as long as you handled the housekeeping correctly (e.g., deleting the relevant ones when an Article is removed).

Is Articles still in development? I'm still in a position where lack of blog category support and functional shoddiness of UI and browser support are the only things that tip me back to WordPress every time someone wants a fairly basic site that's just a little too much for WordPress to handle natively, and without flogging plugins and custom fields etc.

I see there's no end of agreement about the lack of categories. 2.3 is just around the corner and brings a new UI which I'm looking forward to trying out. Are we close to nailing all the above? Will this finally be the dawn of a new age for MODX?