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Category vs Tag

brainolutionbrainolution ✭✭
edited March 2012 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8

I'm confused as to how to best use Categories and Tags. I know what tags are and very comfortable using them. But what I'm not quite clear is how Categories and Tags work in Vanilla.

Let me explain what my requirements are.

My forum will be based on 2 broad topics. Let's call them A and B. Most of the posts would be either on A or B. But there may be some cases where the post applies to both A and B.

If I make two categories A and B, then can I apply both categories to one post? If not, then I'll have to make A and B as tags.

Are there any best practices here that I can learn from?

Thanks.

Best Answers

  • whu606whu606 MVP
    Answer ✓

    @brainolution

    AfaIk Vanilla development is moving away from Categories to recommending tags instead.

    That said, I prefer to use Categories on my forum for our particular needs. I find it helps to stop users creating duplicate threads on pre-existing topics.

    Threads can only belong to one category (at a time.)

  • whu606whu606 MVP
    Answer ✓

    Via the Dashboard you can set the Categories option to Do not display.

    I don't use tagging, but can't see any settings when the plugin is enabled.

Answers

  • whu606whu606 MVP
    Answer ✓

    @brainolution

    AfaIk Vanilla development is moving away from Categories to recommending tags instead.

    That said, I prefer to use Categories on my forum for our particular needs. I find it helps to stop users creating duplicate threads on pre-existing topics.

    Threads can only belong to one category (at a time.)

  • brainolutionbrainolution ✭✭
    edited March 2012

    Thank you for your response. On my forum, I need to use more than one category, so that would mean using tags. For my requirements, tags alone are sufficient, and I see no use of Categories. I have 2 follow-up questions on this:

    1. Can I completely disable the Categories functionality?
    2. Can we prevent regular members from creating new tags? This will allow the administrators/mods to control the tags and work will a broadly defined set of tags.

    Thanks again.

  • whu606whu606 MVP
    Answer ✓

    Via the Dashboard you can set the Categories option to Do not display.

    I don't use tagging, but can't see any settings when the plugin is enabled.

  • brainolutionbrainolution ✭✭
    edited March 2012

    Wow, #1 was easy. Sometimes if the help is so easily available, people like me tend to get lazy and forget that there's a self-help button too :)

    About tagging, I'll post a comment on the Tagging plugin. I think it is important to control the tags. Otherwise people can create multiple tags with similar intent and names. It would be a maintenance nightmare for the moderators to re-tag each post.

    Thanks for your help

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