Remove suggestion to add tags and categories

[joostdevalk]

Right now, in the pre-publish screen, we suggest users to add tags and categories to their post. I'd like to make a few changes to what we do there, and I'll explain why:

• If no tags and no categories are selected, we could suggest adding either a tag or a category. But:
  • If a site doesn't have any tags, we shouldn't suggest adding tags.
  • If a site doesn't have any categories, we shouldn't suggest adding categories.
  • If this leads to not suggesting either, then that's fine.

Right now, we suggest adding tags and categories to every page. Every time someone creates a new tag that way, we create a new URL on the internet that needs to be crawled, when really that page might not be very useful at all.

In my ideal world, if a theme has no support for tags (many don't show tags on post pages), we shouldn't even have an interface for it. We might consider adding something like an add_theme_support feature for tags, where we default to it being on but allow themes to remove_theme_support for tag pages and then not show tags in the interface, or something similar to that extent.

[joostdevalk]

The current suggestion to add tags and categories

[jonoaldersonwp]

I love this. Thin/empty/purposeless tag and category pages are a disease on the web, that we've inadvertently caused. Let's not continue to encourage propagating it!

[matveb]

My impression is that suggestions are more of a symptom. If it's not coordinated with whether tags and categories are shown in other places (post settings inspector, admin menu items, etc) it seems like a poor user experience regardless. So while maybe suggestions exacerbate things, I agree that ideally we can look at the presence of the features more holistically if something is not relevant on a specific site.

I'm not sure the theme use heuristic is deterministic enough—I personally don't list tags on post pages but use them for specific navigation.

I like the idea that if the site doesn't have tags or categories in use at all we could avoid showing the corresponding suggestions UI. That seems like a practical step to look at.

More broadly, I think part of this falls in the same bucket of customizing the features that are relevant and reflecting that across the admin UI. If I have a site made just of pages, or have disabled comments, I shouldn't be bothered with that part of the interface, etc.

[joostdevalk]

I like the idea that if the site doesn't have tags or categories in use at all we could avoid showing the corresponding suggestions UI. That seems like a practical step to look at.

Let's do that then? And maybe also introduce simple filters to disable the suggestions from within a plugin?

[kaosindustries]

As a developer who's tired of hunting for and implementing the various workarounds to hide and disable these suggestions, especially on sites I've already disabled tags for, please do implement this as soon as possible. Are there any plans to do so?

[poena]

I opened an issue for the pre-publish panel in the Gutenberg GitHub repository: ​https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/69452

[mehedi_csit]

@poena Thanks for opening the ticket. I am just checking the ticket, and I will create a PR ASAP.