Help me understand taxonomies vs categories vs tags WordPress

Michael Fields answers:

First, I would figure out what kind of content you will be posting the most of. Reviews? If this is the case, then I would would create a category called review. All reviews would be posts with a "post" post_type. This will leave you open to create other categories such as "news", "announcents", "Contests"... basically anything you feel is a good idea for your site.

Tags - I personally do not use these at all... and would advise against their use on a site such as you are building. I think that they work well in a "blog" setting, but you are creating a review site and I beilive it would be in your best interest to brainstorm your own custom methods of organization.

"Types" - ( casual dining, pizza joint, italian restaurants ) I would create a custom taxonomy for this. You should not use a 'slug' of 'type' when you register it though. This will cause a lot of issues as there seems to be a ghost in the machine. I would use 'restaurant_type'. You can always change the names of the label to "Type" if you desire.

"Location" should definately be a taxonomy. It is one of the best examples of a heirarchical taxonomy that I have encountered. Keeping these separate from your categories is a must IMHO.

A star rating system using a custom taxonomy is also a great idea and I actually have one of these laying around that I can post to my site if you would like to see how I did this. Using a taxonomy will allow you to easily link to an archive of all pizza shops with 5 stars.

I would not create a review post_type at all... I would use posts.

In conclusion, I would always use posts for the main content of the blog. I would then use categories to create "sections" much like chapters in a book or section of a magazine. I never use nested categories. If you find that you need to nest categories, usually a new custom taxonomy is in order.

Here's an article I wrote about Taxonomy [[LINK href="http://wordpress.mfields.org/taxonomy/"]]http://wordpress.mfields.org/taxonomy/[[/LINK]] There is a godd convesation in the comments starting with Haluk.

Best wishes,
-Mike

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Joachim Kudish answers:

Hey Rodney,

So since WordPress 3.0, there have been custom post types & custom taxonomies.

Custom post types are way to have new types of content. By default WordPress has two types of content posts and pages (although technically menus, attachments and revisions are also custom post types, but regardless). So with the help of a few functions you can register a new content type such as "porfolio" or "services" etc.. In your example, your pizza reviews should be a custom post type.

Custom taxonomies are ways for you to classify and organize your content. By default WordPress has two taxonomies, and you mentioned them, tags and categories. New custom taxonomies could be "location", "price", etc.. In the case of your example, you could have the number of stars for the review be a custom taxonomy, or the price bracket, etc...
Really think of custom taxonomies as a way of organizing your content.
Technically speaking there are two different "types" of custom taxonomies, based on either categories or tags. If based on Categories, you will get a series of checkboxes just like with the regular categories and if you base them on tags, you will get a input field where you can enter comma-separated values.

This is how I would personally set-up a pizza-reviewing website:
- Pizza Reviews as a custom post type
- Location as a custom taxonomy based on tags if the locations won't be frequently re-used, or based on categories if they will
- 5-star scale as a custom taxonomy based on categories
- Price as a custom taxonomy based on categories

You could leave tags as they are for your pizza-review for random tags as you mentioned
<blockquote>Maybe quick keywords that describe the pizza "cheesy" "great sauce"?
</blockquote>

Then on this site you could still have a normal blog where you post other food-related articles. I would leave the default Categories for use only with the default posts. Allowing you to have a clear differentiation between posts and pizza reviews for example.

I hope this explains the differences between all of these things. It can definitely be confusing at first. It was for me until I really looked into it a few months ago.

Here are the related WordPress codex articles associated with these APIs:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Post_Types

http://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies

If you want to use these in your site, you will need to register them either via a plugin, which in most cases will provide a user-interface for you, or via the native functions provided for this.

Here a few plugin recommendations:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/more-types/
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/more-taxonomies/

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-taxonomies/

Here are the codex references for the native functions. These will go either in a custom plugin or in your theme's functions.php file:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_post_type
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_taxonomy


Please feel to let me know if you have any further questions.
Happy New Year!

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