This Thursday, April 15th, I will be speaking at the monthly Portland WordPress Users Group at Webtrends in Downtown Portland. The subject I chose to speak about is “New and Exciting Ways to Organize your WordPress Powered Website”. I think that this is the third time that I changed the title. The prior titles contained a strange and exotic word that is most likely new to most WordPress users (actually, most human beings).
I’m adamant about staying true to my goal of creating a presentation that appeals to all skill levels: easy enough for the noobiest-of-noob to understand and engaging enough not to bore the gooiest-of-gurus. Even if this goal is not fully realized, I hope that no one falls asleep, or worse yet buries me in a torrent of rotten fruit.
The word that I removed from the original title is “Taxonomy”. Which remains, to this day, to be a hidden feature in the WordPress Administration Panels. Most common users know not of it’s existence because the only way to activate it is by getting your hands dirty with php.
This is quite a shame.
By creating custom taxonomies to organize your content, it is possible to personalize your website making it easier for both you and your visitors to find that content that they are looking for.
I will be outlining the methods I have used to organize a few of my sites as well as showing how to move from a tag-based system of organization to one the better showcases the content that you create.
All of this can be achieved without writing a single line of php with use of free plugins. For a list of these plugins, please visit my Custom Taxonomy Resource page. I will also be posting the bulk of the presentation to that link sometime after Thursday for those of you who can’t make it out.
Hope to see you there!
Webtrends
Pacific First Center Building
851 SW Sixth Avenue, 16th Floor
Portland, Oregon 97204
6:00pm
Thanks for sharing info on the presentation.
There are so many ways to go with taxonomies. My simple method is to think along the lines of catalogs. Many examples spring to mind when one says that c-word to anybody.
I’ll peruse your Custom Taxonomy Resource page and compare against what I’ve harvested. Let’s share!
Good idea on an easy-to-understand title for the presentation. That “taxonomy” word is a scary unknown to most folks!
:-)
No problem, Thanks for checking it out. I’ll have more posted on the resource page as things progress. I just wanted to get something up there for the presentation so I could give everyone an easy source to go and get the plugins that I’ll be demonstrating.
Totally up for sharing and anything else that builds more awareness of this feature…. really wish there was an interface in the core to define your own taxonomies, but luckily there are a couple plugins that do a great job. Maybe by getting people excited about this feature we can leverage support within the community to push for core inclusion?
Can’t really take credit for the name change… the idea was suggested by Lorelle VanFossen whose presentation at WordCamp 2009 inspired me to write the Taxonomy Shortcode Plugin which got me more excited about taxonomy which got me talking about it with others developers which eventually led to me getting up to courage to ask to present the topic at our local WordPress Group. Funny how these things work :)