[Hamara-users] [Hamara-devel] content, tag cloud vs categories and if tags then need tag cloud and also which type ?

[shirish]

in-line :-

On Wednesday 21 October 2015 11:38 PM, Sam Sayer wrote:
>
>
>> On 21 Oct 2015, at 18:51, shirish <shirish at hamaralinux.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Now that we have been using wordpress a bit, what do people think in terms of content ? Right now most of the blog posts are event coverage, should we limit the blog posts to only events done by hamara or are there any other topics that people would want to know or either contribute to ?
> More info for newbies like me - why use Open Source etc! This will help with a wider reach I think.

Hmm...ok . Added it in my to-do . Blog post about Why use Open Source, 
would be nice if you spell out the etceteras too so I have specific 
understanding of what needs to be shared please.


>> I would like to see more people putting their views about where they see hamara going or where they want to take it. It isn't a community if only Vikas and I are putting up blog posts, so would like to see some more and different content from people within the team at the very least. Anybody from the community who's reading this is of course invited.
>>
>> For e.g. I would like to see wordpress be ready to be used in a single command.
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>> The rest of the blog post could be about the existing way in which you are putting the whole Wordpress stack, if there were any specifics which would make it easier for lot of people to start using without much setting up to do.
>>
>> Maybe some add-ons that should be installed by default if you pull in wordpress, some things which needs to be in recommends and some which are in suggests.
> Post to Twitter is good and saves having to replicate tasks. There are hundreds of thousands of excellent plugins - please do share what functions people want to see in the blog, there’s guaranteed to be a plugin for it!
> I usually add in Yoast SEO, Social Media Auto Publish, Shortcodes Ultimate too.

Cool, do you want these plugins in our wordpress installation too, if 
yes let me know and will raise the bug.

>> The above is just an example, there are and would be lot of ways we could improve on existing ways and means.
>>
>> The second query I have for people is should we have tags or/and categories.
>>
>> Now a simple or uneducated difference between the two is tags are simply words or keywords that come to you when you are writing or reading a blog post. The idea of tags is that it is easier for people to find content about it. A good/bad idea about tags is that sooner or later you have to make a taxonomy so some relationships are defined.
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>> Categories is more the father or grand-father of tags in the sense that it is and used to be official but it doesn't have the free-wheeling casualness that tags have.
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>> There is a spoken or unspoken rule that you can have many tags but cannot have too many categories as supposedly that makes it confusing.
>
> My view is, everything MUST be categorised by at least one, or maybe two categories. Keep them broad - e.g. ‘Conferences’ ‘Development’ 'Design’ etc - I have changed the default to ‘Hamara’ rather than ‘Uncategorised’ too so any post will always have a relevant category if the author forgets to categorise. Of course you can have parent/child relationships, so a DebConf category could come under Conferences, for example.
> Wordpress is built on categories - it is the main taxonomy and can be used for many other purposes too.
> Tags are in addition to this - it is not a case of either or. Tags are useful for as you say, extra SEO, think of them like a hashtag. You can group and control categories very easily - not so with Tags.
>

Ok, point noted, so have categories + tags.

>> If we do end up using tags then we would need to generate a tag cloud.
>>
>> See https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_tag_cloud

This would be a bit more work for our people, but highly desirable as it 
tells a layperson what these people are interested in.

>> Also, we would have to do some work with making the search a bit more tag or category friendly depending on what people think is good.
> Search just searches everything. Of course plugins can be introduced to customise it further, to be more like a Solr search fro example.
> Use Category filters to filter categories and tag clouds to filter by tag. I see tags as meta info, category is the core.
>>
>> Maybe Sam would share some of his inputs in this.
>>
>> --
>> Regards,
>> Shirish Agarwal,
>> Community Lead,
>> Hamaralinux.org
>> _______________________________________________
>> Hamara-devel mailing list
>> Hamara-devel at lists.hamaralinux.org
>> http://lists.hamaralinux.org/listinfo/hamara-devel
>
>

Thank you Sam for sharing your inputs.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org