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Ticket #469 (new enhancement)

Opened 2 years ago

Last modified 2 years ago

Create a fixed categories taxonomy for all blogs under a Lyceum community

Reported by: Adam G Assigned to: jjb
Priority: high Milestone: The Future
Keywords: Cc: ageller@gmail.com

Description

Under a deployment of a Lyceum community, I can see it as very desirable to have the ability for the site admin to define and then lock the categories to be used for classifying posts. A good example of this is that, if I were making a site that hosted 1,000 cooking blogs, I'd most likely want to enforce such categories as "Gadgets," "Recipes," "Exotic Ingredients," etc.

Other than that this helps to create a standard organization across all user's content if that is the admin's goal, but it enables the landing page to cull content from many of the blogs easily. Thus, if I wanted to have a spot on my landing page that showed the 10 most recent "gadgets" entries out of the 1000 blogs, I could. Without fixed taxonomy, we would be limited to harnessing all the content with a mere "most recent posts" box that would show any content type.

SOO, while you're in the code, can I also note that this idea brings about the need to create site-wide RSS feeds by category. So, just as I could have a "recipe" feed from User X, I think we should be able to create a cookingblogs.com "recipe" feed that would ding every time any one of the 1000 users posts something under "recipe" category.

Change History

05/26/06 10:54:33 changed by jjb

  • cc set to ageller@gmail.com.
  • priority changed from normal to high.
  • milestone set to The Future.

05/26/06 14:01:40 changed by Adam

After thinking of how I would apply this to an upcoming site with teachers in mind, I came up with the following categories:

  1. Location information: things to do/see, places to live, local resources (there are 26 different sites that teachers will be writing about)
  2. Instructional Planning and Delivery: lesson plans, power points, worksheets, standards enforcement, policy
  3. Classroom management and culture
  4. Learning theory: professional development, info learned from grad school classes, "how to teach" resources
  5. I am TFA: rants, raves, misc posts, success, funny picture found today on the internet -- basically the personal issues catch-all that can make this a personal blog not just a work blog

The benefit of sleeping on this a bit is that I realized that, while my concept remains good, it should be refined a bit. The site-wide set categories are a guide for participants in the community -- one of the reasons that Lyceum exists rather than 1,000 people making blogs all over the internet -- to have their blogs share some characteristic with other blogs. In this type of shared-purpose implementation, the purpose of existence lends itself to having these "house rules" categories pre-set. Again, my goal is to have a landing page where posts can be culled through and displayed (by RSS feed). But, if a special ed teacher thinks that creating another sub-category to deal with IEPs, then this is still possible and encouraged. As a child category of "Instructional Planning," the site would still benefit by having some sort of overall structure b/c the IEP content would "roll-up" into the larger structure already in place. The user, in this case, does not suffer from a set-in-stone taxonomy.

I think that, adding in this site-wide category functionality needs more than just on/off configuration. In the above example, I would need to set site-wide parent categories and then dissallow users from being able to delete those categories or create new top-level categories while still allowing users to create sub categories of any type.

In other applications, though, the rules may need to be different. Let's use as an example the professor implementation from Lyceum's own docs. If a prof is creating a site for students to post work using Lyceum, she is likely doing it b/c of the ease of the platform for students to participate with little tech knowledge. Keeping in mind that blogs are the CMS and not the necessarily a philosophy of internet freedom, this academic application might greatly benefit from the admin being able to enforce a rigid taxonomy without users creating any types of sub categories. For example, she might want a category for homework, quizzes, and lecture notes only. Or, the prof might want to create several static child categories of "lecture notes" to reflect each unit. Since the teacher is providing the blog for a purpose, the students don't necessarily have the "right" to demand freedom to be able to create a new category called "Prof. Smith is cool." While this is verging on (gasp) censorship, I think that this should be allowed. The students, in this case, benefit from the rigid structure. The organization of the collection of blogs allows them to function as a collection rather than just independent student blogs. If the students want to have a place to talk about profs, they will create their own community to do so. (Hopefully, they will create a Lyceum community that is structured such that it draws students from many universities.)

At the end of the day, each blog community has its own standards, rules and organization schema. At myspace.com, users are confined to certain content-heading areas but the look can be adjusted. At blogger.com, they are confined to the blogger api limitations but open to most any type of content. At xxxblogs.com (fictional), users are allowed to post nude photos of themselves which they can't do at myspace.com.

The point is that the community creator did just that: created a community with a purpose. Some communities have a much wider purpose and greater lattitude for their members (blogger), while others may focus the scope of the content or the way it is organized (as suggested in my teacher blogs). In the end, the implementer has the final say in how the technology is utilized. I think it is important to design this funtionality in, because without it a Lyceum community is truly /only/ an enterprise implementation of Wordpress with a bunch of disconnected blogs. Having the ability to interconnect the blogs via shared feeds is a powerful tool that helps engender the growth of the site. The blogs become more than just isolated accounts of an experience all residing on the same server.

Lyceum is a new enterprise CMS, not just a new way to deploy blogs; all enterprises have a purpose in deploying their CMS. Building this simple "community feature" allows the controlling enterprise to more clearly define the purpose of the system's existence if it is desired.

Because I wanted to make sure I wasn't way off base on this idea, I did some internet searching. See this Wordpress MU forum thread for a (extremely more brief) discussion of "global categories": http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=568

--adam

06/05/06 15:57:13 changed by ageller

jjb wrote on redhat:

... For example, all posts in WordPress? must have a category. All categories in Lyceum may only be associated with one blog. Therefore, posts are associated with a blog through their categories, and the posts table does not need a blog column.

Does this mean a site-wide category system could /not/ depend on uber categories across the whole site. A post in BlogA category Education can not have the same id in the categories table as BlogB category Education, otherwise how could the system tell which blog the post should drop into. Therefore, does this also means that site-wide feeds off of uber categories can not exist?

If the above is true, then I imagine a site-wide category system would have to be implemented through a script as part of the blog-creation process. Each new blog could be pre-populated with some categories.

Drawback: a category, once decided upon, could not easily be modified as time goes on. New site-wide categories would have to be added to all blogs via a script to add entries to the categories table.

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