Today while browsing through my daily feeds, I noticed a great post over at Performancing about getting your blog organized with categories and tags.  This post got the creative juices flowing a bit and got me thinking about both categories and tags.

I make it a point to engage in discussions regularly with my fellow bloggers about a variety of topics I have an interest in, including blogging, affiliate marketing, internet real estate, etc.   One thing I always like to find out from fellow WordPress users is whether or not they’re using the tag system that was introduced in WordPress 2.3.   What I’ve found are some very diverse responses, ranging from them not understanding how tags work, to some people that actually prefer to just use tags instead of categories.  Of course in the middle are the people that are attempting to use both.

I personally use categories on all of my sites, but only choose to use tags on a few of them.   For the ones that I do use tags on, I make sure to use the Recommended Tags WordPress plugin so I don’t go overboard with the tags I use.

I’d love to get your take on this.  Do you use categories and/or tags on your blog?

One of the disappointing changes in WordPress 2.5 was the removal of category ID numbers.   I thought this was just a minor oversight, but since the 2.5.1 upgrade this problem still was not addressed.

If you are looking for a category number (this is most often needed for setting up the homepage of Magazine WordPress themes), here is a really easy way you can locate it until the WordPress team adds the category number display we all took for granted before:

1) Go to Manage > Categories.

2) Hover your mouse over the category that you need the ID of.

3) Look in the lower left corner of your web browser for the ID of that category.

Here is a screenshot example:

Hopefully WordPress will again display the category ID in one of the future updates, but thankfully this workaround is really easy.

Here are some great WordPress-related posts I’ve enjoyed over the past week:

• Track WordPress 2.6 Progress - Quick Online Tips gives some suggestions on how to keep up with the progress of WordPress 2.6.
• How to Create a Dynamic Sidebar - This is something we’ve covered on a couple different occasions here on this site, but I wanted to point out this post because I think Richard does a great job of explaining how to tell WordPress what to display on each page.
• Project M Finally Announced - Justin Tadlock finally announced the details of his Project M. It appears it is a theme club of sorts, but with a twist. Click over to get the details.
• Do It Yourself WordPress Theme - Hayes Potter has come up with an interesting idea by releasing a WordPress theme. Simply build your stylesheet and you are done.
• WordPress Tricks - Stylized Web offers some useful PHP code snippets for WordPress.
• Making Authors Template Page - Also from Justin Tadlock, this post does a great job detailing how to make a WordPress authors template page.
• Displaying Related Categories and Content in WordPress - Darren Hoyt shares the code he used to make this feature in his popular Mimbo Pro theme.

It has been awhile since I’ve done one of these, so here is a quick post highlighting some interesting posts from around the blogosphere that are related to WordPress.

• CagIntranet explains how to create a category loop to display those posts in your sidebar. Chris Pearson has also written a great post about the ideal way to use your blogs categories.
• Weblog Tools Collection has done a final WordCamp Dallas 2008 wrap up. The post includes notes and pictures from the event (including pictures of the WTC authors!)
• ProBlogDesign has posted 60 RSS icons that you can use for your blog. This post includes some incredible RSS icons that anyone can use.
• Noupe has posted a powerful list of WordPress plugins. This is a large collection of WordPress plugins anyone can use and should help you find just about anything you need.
• Theme Lab provides a great tutorial guiding you on how to put your available domains to good use. I have about 200 domains I’m not currently using and I’ve been trying to figure out if I should sell them or start using them. If done tastefully and legally, this could be a great use for these domains.
• WordPress Max has written a post explaining how to use your WordPress blogroll feature for site navigation in your sidebar. This is a creative and interesting idea allowing you to create links from your dashboard to feature content.
• Performancing explains how to use WordPress custom fields to auto-embed YouTube videos.

Many WordPress themes are setup to display their category pages in the same format as your blog’s homepage, making your categories useless to some. This can cause duplicate content problems, as well as making your categories difficult to avoid. If this isn’t the case for you, then your theme is probably instead setup to just display a post excerpt for each post on your category page. I’ve never been a fan of this either, as this format strips your post of links/styles and doesn’t give you control over how much of the post to display.

Instead, I’ve always liked the idea of showing only the post titles on your category pages. If you are good at making post titles, this should help someone navigating your categories to find what they are looking for.

First, you’ll want to open your archive.php file and find the post loop. It usually starts with this code (or something similar):

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

You’ll want to delete everything from that code down to the end of the loop, which usually ends with this:

<?php endif; ?>

Now, you’ll want to replace the post loop code with the following slightly different code loop:

<?php $temp_category = single_cat_title('',false); if (!empty($temp_category)){ // give index ?>
<h1><?php single_cat_title(); ?></h1>
<p><?php echo(category_description(the_category_ID(false))); ?></p>
<?php if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li><br>
<?php endforeach; else: ?>
<p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php }else{ // give details or single post ?>
...... code for normal post overview
<?php } ?>

And you’re done! You can add<li>, <ol>, and whatever else as needed, and then style your archives page in your stylesheet to get the look you’re trying to achieve.

One thing more WordPress bloggers have been doing lately is moving their categories over to a horizontal menu, rather than displaying them in the sidebar.   Depending on the type of blog you run and how well you keep your categories organized, I think this can be a great idea to help manage the website and improve overall navigation.  Doing something like this allows for a much better use of sub-categories, and gives you the option of displaying them in a drop-down to give your blog a much more professional feeling.

If you are interested in moving your WordPress categories into a menu and then displaying sub-categories in a drop-down menu, Anthology of Ideas has taken the time to write a detailed post explaining how to display WordPress categories in a horizontal drop-down menu.   You can also view their menu to see if you like it.  I recommend you check it out before attempting this on your own.

Of course doing this will require the use of Javascript, but the author does a great job of detailing the process and provides the CSS required to style it properly.  Once you have everything up and running correctly, you can then adjust the colors and margins to give your new menu the look and feel you want it to have, as well as fully integrate it into your WordPress theme.

I like the idea of having the sub-categories be drop-down menus, but one downside I see is that displaying categories in a menu sort of eliminates using a traditional menu for your pages.  It would be hard, in my opinion, to achieve a good look with more than one menu, so you then have to find a different way to display your blog pages.   I think you are probably best off using this method mostly if you are trying to achieve a magazine-style look or some sort of a content management system (CMS).

What do you think of moving your categories to a menu and displaying your sub-categories in drop-down boxes?