using categories to differentiate between user and rss submissions

[jackdaw]

This is a tweak that I'm trying out on my testsite swimfo.com

As mentioned earlier, I'm a bit confused about the whole category issue. If users have to choose eg. 'sport' as category, then they tend not to mention 'sport' also as a tag. And then the tag cloud gets skewed, since it (to my knowledge) doesn't tally up usage of category choices, along with tags. My 'solution' was to make some vague category titles like eg. 'sportnews', that didn't discourage users from using category title that I ought to have used as tag :-S

Add to this that I'm a big fan of the Magpie mod, which pumps news from RSS sources into the swimfo site with regular intervals. It allows me to define with which category to post the news from each RSS source, but unfortunately just the one category per source.

So now I had some bogus categories that users should choose between, while all news from my RSS source just got dumped into one category. I tried for a while to edit the news from RSS sources manually, redirecting them into the correct sections, but that was just too plain boring.

So. My current solution is to quit the whole category idea, and use them to differentiate between sources instead. At the moment, I have only two categories: 'swimfo users' and 'SwimmingWorld'. Magpie makes all news from my RSS source SwimmingWorld go into the 'SwimmingWorld' category; and I force the users to use only the 'swimfo users' category with their posts, by hiding the usual radio buttons and using a hidden input box instead.

My setup:

- pligg 153
- the magpie-mod

My tweak:

In /templates/mollio-beat/submit_step_2.tpl:

<!-- ORIGINAL CODE COMMENTED OUT ...
<p class="l-mid">
	<label for="category" accesskey="1">{#PLIGG_Visual_Submit2_Category#}:</label>
	<span class="form-note">{#PLIGG_Visual_Submit2_CatInstruct#}</span>
	<ul id="category" class="column-list">
	{section name=nr loop=$categories}
		<li><input name="category" type="radio" id="select-i" value="{$categories[nr].category_id}"/>{$categories[nr].category_name}</li>
	{/section}
	</ul>
</p>
-->
<input name="category" type="hidden" id="select-i" value="1">

I've at last replaced all mentioning of category with 'channel' instead, in the libs/lang.conf and in /templates/mollio-beat/sidebar_modules/categories.tpl

This tweak is brand new, so I have no idea if I'll be happy with it in the long run. I'll let you know :-)

And if somebody already has mentioned a similar tweak somewhere else in this forum, then excuse me for not finding it.

AND please, if you want to test my tweak on swimfo.com, the please either stop before actually posting your test post... or find something swimming relevant :-)