Back in the old days of blogging, my first ever blog (then hosted on Blogger) didn’t even have categories. Posts were just posts, and there was no way of organizing the content, aside from chronological order (by month, by year). When I moved to a Blog:CMS powered blog, I got to appreciate the wonder of taxonomy. The software now allowed me to categorize my content. And I thought it was really powerful.

However, there were limitations. Blog:CMS only supported one category per post. Imagine that! So when I got my first taste of WordPress, one of the things I really liked was how I was no longer constrained by a single choice of category.

So it was cool the way I could assign more than one category to each of my blog posts. However, this was still a plain old taxonomy system, and my category list was growing. A negative side-effect of this was that on my sidebar, the category list had grown too long for comfort, making the sidebar longer than the main content area in most occasions (especially on short posts).

Then Came the Tags

Then tagging systems became popularized by sites like Technorati and del.icio.us. They say tagging is better than categorization because people are free to just attach keywords to their blog posts (or shared links), according to their needs and preferences. You’re no longer constrained to choose a few categories or sub-categories where an item might belong to.

Another benefit of tagging was SEO and link-building. When a blog pings Technorati with a new post notification, Technorati lists that blog post under the appropriate tag. So bloggers get the benefit of being linked to and indexed by Technorati. Same goes with social bookmarking. You can list posts and links according to how people have tagged them.

When I first installed a tagging plugin (which was UTW by Christine Davis), I immediately stopped using WordPress categories, since I thought these were going to be useless anyway. I was going to use the tagging system to organize my posts. However, later on, I realized WP’s category system was more and more turning into something akin to tagging. Especially with WP 2.1 onwards, one could just key in a new category on the create post screen, and that would be added to the list. You could even separate multiple new categories with commas, and these will be created when you publish a post.

And then I read somewhere that latter versions of WP will likely feature internal tagging systems, and will cease to be compatible with tagging plugins. So I started to use categorization again, alongside tagging. I thought why not–taxonomy and folksonomy make for a good combination. I could organize my blog posts both by topic, and by keyword!

And then of course, there was the realization that categories and tags don’t necessarily have to be equivalent. If you want a more thorough discussion of the tags vs. categories issue, this Lorelle on WordPress post would be a good read.

The bigger issue, though, is not only the matter of whether to use one or the other, or both, but also how to present this to blog readers, with usability and functionality in mind.

Designing with Tags and Categories in Mind

Now one important consideration I had when I implemented both tags and categories on my WordPress blogs was how to display tags and categories on my blog. It was common among blogs with tagging systems to display a tag cloud, to show readers which tags/keywords were popular. And it was common to list tags either in place of, or alongside, categories on blog postings.

So with both tags and categories in mind, I had to think of a way to set these up in a manner that looks good, and functional at the same time. How I usually present it would be as such:

• Category archive on a separate page
• Tag cloud on a separate page
• Post list by category and by tag on separate pages each

And on the posts,

• Post categorization on the header, along with the title and date information
• Tags below the post, along with the other metadata

I prefer not to put my tags on the sidebar because these would just clutter the interface. My tag cloud is on a single page, which would look like this:

On each post, the categorization is found alongside the header, and the tag list is on the footer. Both of these link to the archive for each category or tag, so readers can check out other articles categorized or tagged the same.

When these links are clicked, they lead to the category and tag archive, respectively:

I would usually prefer not to have tag clouds or even category lists persistent on all pages, unless you have only a few categories and/or tags to display. But trust me, your tag list will surely grow big as your post more items on your blog. Maybe your category list can be limited to just a few items, but with tags, I don’t think so!