A Peek into a Mind

This is a little different from the regular politics/security issues I usually talk about in my blog, but I’m also a technical person and sometimes I write technical stuff. The following is a post I made on the Joomla 1.5 forums, strongly going against the concept of Sections and Categories as a way of categorizing content:

I just tried Joomla 1.5 lately and was very disappointed that one of the major flaws in Joomla was not addressed at all. I’ll say it in one word: Tags.

I think that some people are completely missing out the whole concept. Tags suppose to render Sections and Categories obsolete. There is no longer need for those. The correct use of tags frees your content completely from this really stupid categorization.

The only way this categorization system works is if each article is completely unrelated to other issues covered by the site. So for each article there could be only ONE category to fit. How many such sites do you know? Does YOUR site fits that?

I hoped Joomla 1.5 will have a tags management system without any Sections/Categories restriction. I mean, if someone wants to restrict himself, he can do it by himself. Or write a plug-in to restrict himself. But why force us all to adhere to a categorization system that is unintuitive, restraining and to be honest, one of the weakest ever points in Joomla?

I’m sure all of you here, which manage a site with a lot of content, can understand me. How many times have you stared at the screen thinking “Damn, but this piece fits 2 or 3 places! What do I do?”

Sections/Categories are a really bad structure. For example, I have a development site. Lets say I cover both Java and Flash. I want each to have a news category and a tutorials category. Now, I have one 2 ways to construct this with a sections/categories system:

Section JAVA —-> Categories: NEWS, TUTORIALS.
Section FLASH —> Categories: NEWS, TUTORIALS.

or

Section NEWS ——–> Categories: JAVA, FLASH.
Section TUTORIALS —> Categories: JAVA, FLASH.

Both ways are very restricting. What if I have an article about integrating Flash and Java? Where do I put it? What if I want to have NEWS from both java and flash on the front page, but a different page for each with only relevant news (Java news, Flash news) ?

This gets even worse if you have more sections/categories, like most of us do.

Wouldn’t it be much easier to have that ‘Flash in Java’ article tagged Java, Flash, News ?
Then it appears as Java news AND Flash news AND news (in general).

Then I can have a dedicated page covering all items related to JAVA (which I can categorize by the other tags, with special CSS, and any tag that ever was with assigned to an item with the java tag can be present) and such a page can be available to every tag ever used.

The reason I go out against the thinking in the Joomla core, is that once you restrict your core to sections/categories, there is no way to avoid it. No extension can truly make the system free again. While if you’d based your system on Tags, it can easily handle the Sections/Categories structure.

My site runs on Joomla 1.x, with quite a few professional components I had to buy to allow Joomla to become most of what I wanted. Still, no component can go against Joomla’s basic structure therefore I feel very bad about the future of the system. I think even WORDPRESS can handle high-content-volume sites better in this respect.

So, sadly, I currently see no way in the future I’ll upgrade my site to Joomla 1.5. If I’ll make the hassle of changing my site core platform, it needs to be one that solves this content issue. I’m too frustrated to continue managing all the content the same old restrictive way. Even though I do like joomla.