Working with categories

[jacknoir]

Hello everyone,

Thanks for a great piece of software and for all the support that is available!!

I have just installed Pligg on a testdomain www.boligpro.dk and I am trying to get the categories working.

For some reason only 2 categories will show even though I have added several in the admin section. Anyone got any ideas why?

Also I would like to work with either categories and subcategories or maybe with different sets of categories if that is easier to create. Is this possible with Pligg and if so, how? I can see that there is a category parent option in the categories database table but I can't get it to work..

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts....

jacknoir

[jackdaw]

hello Denmark, Faroe Isles here

Categories are hidden until you post stories using them.

Subcategories do not work yet with Pligg, as you can read for example here: http://www.pligg.com/forum/showthread.php?t=661. The parent option in the database table is from the original Menéame code.

My advice is though to be a bit conservative with using the categories too much, here in the beginning. I started out with having a lot of them, but chose to delete most of them again later on... which was tedious, as I had to remap all the stories that used the now deleted categories.

One reason is that they might (or might not) go, in the near future. Read this interesting discussion, where 3dkiller and juicecowboy fight over whether categories are good or bad: http://www.pligg.com/forum/showthrea...=5040#post5040

My personal opinion about categories is that they are confusing. They're not really usuable for categorization(!), as you can only use one with each story. So me and my users got into problems with instances where a story fitted into eg. both the category 'Denmark' and 'Politics'. The Pligg categories are more like sections in a newspaper, where you choose if a story fits into eg. the 'sport' or 'economy' sections, but of course not in both (as you don't want duplicated stories in the same paper).

Another problem is, that they don't show in the tag cloud. In my case, I chose for example 'sport' as a category title, but then later on realized that this made 'sport' disappear in the tag cloud. I guess most users feel that if they're forced to choose 'sport' as category, they don't also have to mention 'sport' as a tag. So I'm now using more fluffy category titles like 'other news' and 'nerd stuff', in order to not prevent users from using good categorization words like 'business' and 'technology' as tags.

But the one good thing about categories is, that you don't get all the variations of the same concept, as with tags. For example, if you did decide to use 'sport' as a category, you wouldn't get variations like 'sports' and 'sport news'. I intended to write this under 'suggestions', here in the Pligg forum, but since I'm already warm, I'll just start out with mentioning it here: I think the Pligg core developers ought to look at how another good open source social bookmarking cms called Scuttle encourages people to recycle tags, by allowing users to just click on a list of the most popular tags, when posting a story or link. It is simple and works really well.

[AshDigg]

Originally Posted by jackdaw

Another problem is, that they don't show in the tag cloud. In my case, I chose for example 'sport' as a category title, but then later on realized that this made 'sport' disappear in the tag cloud. I guess most users feel that if they're forced to choose 'sport' as category, they don't also have to mention 'sport' as a tag.

Good point, I hadn't thought of that!

[3dKiller]

I think the Pligg core developers ought to look at how another good open source social bookmarking cms called Scuttle encourages people to recycle tags, by allowing users to just click on a list of the most popular tags, when posting a story or link. It is simple and works really well.

jackdaw,

I checked out scuttle; here are my notes:

1. I like how the registration process verifies UN availability automatically, nice. I don't care however for the e-mail verification, followed by logging in. I prefer our captcha method.

2. I like how you can import your bookmarks from del.icio.us. Great feature. To be honest I was unaware I could export my BM's from del.icio.us. Wouldn't it be great if our users could import their stories from digg? Hm.

3. Neat effect when grabbing url title, but I still say del.icio.us is best for adding bookmarks, and we should adopt that one-step method for submitting stories.

4. Ok, I submitted my first BM, and scuttle closed :( What's up with that? It looks like there system still needs work.

So I didn't really see what you were talking about – the recycled tags list. Maybe the tags I chose weren't available? Dunno. I'll check it again later.

~3d

[jackdaw]

Originally Posted by 3dKiller

So I didn't really see what you were talking about – the recycled tags list. Maybe the tags I chose weren't available?

Right, it seems that it only shows your own tags, or something like that. I discovered the feature by running my own version of scuttle, on my own server, and after adding a lot of tags.

But the feature is, that a list of popular tags is shown below the 'add a bookmark' form, where you can just click on an existing tag to use it with a new bookmark. See picture below, where I've clicked on 'battlefield 1942' and am hovering over 'bf1942'. I did not type 'battlefield 1942,' in the submit form, so... it's magic ! :)

[daveyc]

brought this up elsewhere on pligg, but that particular feature is killer for those wishing to maintain some semblance of a useful site, particularly in the absense of a "lot of categories" - i'm torn on categories, some relevance, but not into too many....

could this be implemented as an auto-suggest feature> eg you start to type a tag and it queries dbase in background and begins to suggest via a pop out list the relevant possible tags to avoid duplication?