Taxonmies and Generic Categories

  • I propably won’t get many repsonses from this as it is quite an unusual request.

    I have a project I’m working on which is will be a story driven media, with a made up world that has it’s own plants and continents, and species.

    Because of this, i need some sort of dictionary that has a definition of all the different types of animals, creatures, plants etc inside it.

    Now because I have never created such taxonomy systems, I’m struggling on where to start and think about completing this.

    I was hoping i could modify WordPress to take care of this because memebers usinsg the WordPress blog would also be using the Dictionary, however maybe someone knows of another service I could use that could be used?

    There are some features I’d like the dictionary to be capable of.

    1. Be able to store a definition list of abbrivations and then automatically recall it when needed.
    2. Allow comments on each type of plant or animal etc.
    3. Be able to have metadata that can listed when the user wants. It could be other species in the same family or where it’s natural habitats are; and then the user could click on one of these to get a description of that particular reference.
    4. Another useful feature would be if this could have a nice easy to use backend, with an easy to understand user interface. (preferably intergrated into WordPress’ backend)
    5. Different members could do with different permissions, ie what they can see, and what they can edit or upload themselves.

    I know this is a lot of different questions in general, but what I’m after is really just some thought on where I should start first, a kick in the right direction. And what ideas other people have? It started of as a simple project just using the categories provided in WordPress but then I wanted more and more and more! lol

    Another question is, I’m really struggling to decide generic names for example things like places, environments, and lanscapes, I mean would “geographical” be the best word to use?

    Anyway, any feedback would be great. Thanks for reading this far.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Best I know is your point 3 more or less rules WordPress out. Then again, it rules out much about any CMS out there.

    If you can code, I suggest you take a look at my node graph plugin project:

    https://www.semiologic.com/projects/node-graph/

    I’ve really no time to code it at the moment, but I’ll readily offer ideas and insights if someone else takes care of it.

    Arguably, if you happen to be willing to pay me to do it, it is another matter entirely. ??

    Thread Starter sevenupcan

    (@sevenupcan)

    Thanks for responding. I’m afraid I’m no good at indepth php code or other similar languages.

    This tag system your talking about. How difficult would it be to implement just this into WordPress, does the whole structure of WordPress change when you apply this system to it?

    It’s funny you mention pay. If I feel I cannot create something adequet for my needs I might be willing to pay someone to do it properly, ie you. However, there are a few things. This is only for a hobbie and I wouldn’t be making any gain on what I’ve paid you. Secondly when you have created it, do you offer it to everyone else? (which I think would be only fair to everyone else) but then I’ve already paid for it. :S And lastly how long would it take to complete?

    So i guess, my best bet is to find a slow alternative “for-now” method. I’ll continue to see what I can do, and thank-you for providing that link to your article, your other articles about semantic webs and folksonomies were good reads.

    I would look at TextPattern as well Drupal as possible alternative, WP can do a heck of a lot, but it’s not a full fledged CMS. 3 I think might be done, but will require some clever coding and/or rewriting. Look around, try a few other things. Or perhaps re-evaluate your needs and scale them down a little. If you fele you cannot compromise it may be a case of having abespoke project

    My understanding of your requirements is that you can temporarily stick to WordPress in its current state. Some day, however, you’ll bump into a problem that is related to the way WordPress manages categories.

    That day, you’ll want to upgrade your ‘animal’ post and add a list of animals in the middle of it. WordPress won’t allow you to do this short of inserting the list manually. The same goes for all other CMS I know of.

    ‘When you have created it, do you offer it to everyone else?’

    It would be GPL, just like my other plugins. But I imagine that if it’s just for a hobby, you won’t feel inclined to pay me a??50/hour.

    ‘This tag system your talking about. How difficult would it be to implement just this into WordPress, does the whole structure of WordPress change when you apply this system to it?’

    It is certainly non-trivial. Implementing ‘just this’ is essentially implementing the whole thing. The whole structure of WordPress doesn’t change in itself, you’d be adding three new tables (post2post, tags, post2tag), creating the editors to manage these as relevant, and creating a bunch of new template tags.

    Note that to a certain extent, WordPress can do most of what you want to do already by letting you define custom fields and custom page templates for your static pages. You’ll need to make the appropriate number of templates and so on, and you’ll need to play a lot with $wpdb, but you’ll eventually make it.

    Thread Starter sevenupcan

    (@sevenupcan)

    Thanks Denis for your input it’s been really useful. I’m lookng at creating template pages that will accomodate for my needs.

    I’ve seen these custom fields but never really understood their use, i’ll look on the Codex and see if I can find some info on them.

    Jinsan thanks for informing me of Drupal I did a search and found their site, looks like it can do a lot, would take some time to master it though like all things.

    That’s what i like about WordPress, it’s the most rounded of CMS i know, very neatly done, even if it’s not a fully pledged CMS, after all it is called WordPress.

    Thanks again, i’ll let you guys know if I make something of this.

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