Desperate to be able to categorize pages

Why not simply make them children of specific Pages?

I would also point out that lots of pages (i.e. hundreds) can slow down WordPress. It’s kinda built for posts.

Custom Post Types might be a better solution.

Esmi, for instance on an interior designer’s site the pages are children of the projects page, and when there is enough content the projects page may have sub groping pages by type of projects. But because this client works in many cities and states it would be helpful for prospective clients in different regions to have the same content spilled by state. I would also like to spill project pages by thematic elements as well. So I could get one of the groupings using page parent <-> child relationships I cannot expose the pages in the number of ways I want.

Ipstenu,

I do not follow your logic. Usually in a blog you have hundreds of blog posts and few pages. Even in a site with a relatively large number of pages there are usually fewer pages than posts. I don’t see how categories on pages would prove more taxing to the system that categories on posts.

Even if there were thousands of pages and thousands of pages I just cannot see how maintaining and using category <-> type <-> contentID relationships can be that taxing to the system.

levitymn – You’d think, but it’s a function of Pretty Permalinks.

I’ll quote @otto from https://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/ :

But what if you have a lot of Pages? I once read a post by a person who had over 50,000 Pages on his site. That is a special case obviously, but consider our lookup system. We’re going through these rules one at a time. With our first method, our rule list was only 10 rules, maximum. With this new method, you add a rule for every single Page you make. Going through 50,000 rules takes a lot longer than going through 10. And even just building that list of rules can take a long time.

Basically you’ve created a performance issue. Your Pages now won’t scale to unlimited numbers. Your site’s speed is linearly dependent on the number of Pages you have.

This is a bad thing.

Ipstenu,

That issues is referring to using %category% in the generation of permalinks. I think in this article the term “page” is not referring to the WordPress Page type but instead content referred to by a URL. Really the post you reference has nothing to do with categorization but with using a string (instead of a number) for the first part of your permalink structure.

I am not suggesting using category for any part of the permalink structure for pages. I am looking to just be able to associate categories to pages so I can generate categorized lists of content.

Read the WHOLE post. The issue is not just using category in your URLs, it was just the starting point. And yes, Otto is definitely speaking about pages (not posts). He knows what he’s talking about.

I am looking to just be able to associate categories to pages so I can generate categorized lists of content.

And I’m telling you, from experience, that at a certain point, using PAGES for this will bog down your site. You can achieve the same result with Custom Post Types and avoid the problems.

Or try and hack https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/page2cat/ to work with 3.0 (it’s been abandoned by the dev).

Ipstenu,

Actually I did read the WHOLE post, multiple times and again after your reply. Even the section about “Pages” specifically mentions going through the rewrite rules one at a time. The act of categorizing something does not affect the rewrite rules, unless you have put %category% in your permalink structure settings.

You are right Otto does indeed know what he is talking about and he is talking about permalinks and rewrite rules in that post with respect to how starting a permalink with an string type variable like %category% is bad, not about categorizing WordPress Pages.

The act of categorizing something does not affect the rewrite rules, unless you have put %category% in your permalink structure settings.

I never said it did (and that would be ‘unless you put %category% or a non numeric setting FIRST in your permalink structure’ if we wanna nitpick, but I get that you get that ?? )

What I said was that if you use too many pages, you can bog down your site. And that’s still true. Even with ‘correct’ permalink rules (%year% whatever). Not because it has to go through the pages FIRST, but because it has to go through ALL the pages (not to mention that I believe the rules are all stored in your options table, which can get pretty darn big if you have a lot of pages… there was a trac about this I read not long ago). I don’t know how many pages you’re talking about, but given that you’re at the point where you want to apply categories to them, I’m going to assume upwards of 50 pages and not 10-ish.

If you google wordpress too many pages there are a significant number of people who’ve run into problems with it.

Aside of all that, you can have better ‘structure’ with posts. They’re simply more flexible with permalinks, CPTs, tags, etc. They’ve got what you want, and they’re just as ‘doable’ as trying to update an old plugin.

I can see how pages can increase the rule set since they do not use dates in the generation of their perma links. Having said that, it is not pertinent to categorizing pages. This post is about the ability to categorize pages not the poor performance lots of pages will induce in a worpress install.

I want to be able to categorize a reasonable number of pages with good parent <-> child relationships (which should improve page performance), in the tens of pages. the act of using categories with pages does not induce the performance issues of pages, the very nature of pages does. Turning this conversation into a discussion around the poor performance of many pages is a derailment of the topic. Let us set that aside.

I can see how custom post types could be beneficial in many places that one would use categorized pages, however I do not have the time to write custom post type code for every site I manage where I need solid categorization of content. Custom content types are a developer solution not a user solution and far more time consuming than categorizing and spilling links to categorized content.

to end the thread about many pages causing performance issues let me state one more time:

This discussion is about categorizing pages not the performance issues induced by having too many pages.

I can still only find a few options for you.

1) Fix this to work on 3.0: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/page2cat/

2) Find an acceptable alternative to using pages.

3) Try this: https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/11550 (though it looks like only one category per page? I’m not sure).

The point about pages and performance degradation was meant as common curtsey, as if you DIDN’T know that and found your site mega slow at 100+ pages, you’d be pissed off. At least you’re forewarned ??