Categories are great for rough sorting, like a category for Music and another for Books, but they should never be too niche. Tags, on the other hand, can be as precise as needed, which means that a book review may belong to the category Books, and have the author as a tag, along with the genre, the book title, and so on.
The purpose of this isn’t just nomenclature, there’s also technical gains to the decision. First of all, it is easy to create custom looks for category listings using the category.php and even category-X.php (X is the ID) template files. These can let you list one kind of content in one way, and the other in another.
Tags, on the other hand, are niched in themselves and should be viewed partly as search keywords that get grouped together, and partly as descriptions of the content. They can be useful as both, especially when you want to collect all those J. K. Rowling book reviews without having to force a traditional (and not so exact) search. By carefully considering how you set up categories and tags, and how they relate to each other, you can achieve a great deal.
Custom fields are very useful. They can store data as well as images, and they can fill in the blanks when you need more than just a title, a slug, the content, and an excerpt, or when you want to sidestep the categories and tags. That’s great. They are not, however, very user-friendly as I’ve already argued, and that means you need to be wary.
A lot of funky WordPress-powered sites need to rely heavily on custom fields, but if they do you need to educate the people running them. A plugin, which can do the same thing but just not show it, may in fact be a better idea.
Pages have a great strength in that you can have just about as many as you want, and each and every one of them can have its own Page template if you like. That means that anything you can do with WordPress can be accessible at the address of your choosing. Hence, most of my Page templates don’t include the actual Page’s content or the traditional WordPress loop.
Rather, they do other things, and while they may be a bit rough to manage by themselves you have to hack the template file since there’s nothing more than a title and a slug in WordPress admin they can step outside the box.
Think about it. Say you need to show offyour work stored at another service. You can include it by using the service’s own JavaScript widget code, and you can even have it exist in itself that way; all functionality is included. Unfortunately, WordPress wouldn’t let that code through. The solution is to just create a Page template and put the code there.
The same goes for Google Custom Search Engine result listings, for showing offRSS feed content or your lifestream. The Page template is a powerful tool. Use it wisely.
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05192010
1. Creating Your Own Wordpress Template Tags
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