Deprioritize categories

[joostdevalk]

In the old days of blogging, we used categories. Nice, hierarchical structures which we all understood how they worked. However, as I was recently discussing the many issues around tags and categories with @matt, he made a strong point: people coming into blogging these days might understand tags a whole lot better than categories.

We also agreed that the fact that by default, WordPress ships with two taxonomies, (categories and tags), is less than ideal from a new user UX perspective.

So I'm proposing a change (for which @matt should actually get credit as he said it first in our conversation): we should (slowly) deprioritize categories. To start, on the pre-publish checks, we should not suggest people add a category to their post if they've never done so, or if they only have posts in the "Uncategorized" category.

I'd also suggest removing the Categories panel if that's the case. Would love to hear other opinions, or see implementations :)

[tw2113]

As a fan and believer in "historical" blogging for lack of better wording, I'd support this if it's possible to restore current default behavior via filter/option/etc. Much like the Links menu and blogrolls are still available with the correct code.

Keep WordPress a blogging platform, even if no longer necessarily an out-of-box feature.

[knutsp]

Agreed, but as several new "unfeatures" has been implemented, only for new installs (by initial DB version).

New installs could have an onboarding screen when entering Posts - Categories, with some intro text and a choiche to rename the "Uncategorized" (including resetting the slug) and add a or a few new top level categories, with suggestions. The categories should appear as box in the posts posts editor. A filter may restore old behviour.

[Otto42]

As is commonplace, I highly disagree with @matt here. 😀

Categories remain an important part of the blogging experience, and a great way to organize content.

Tags are fine and all, and people may understand it better, but they don't use them for things like URLs or other things for which categories are frequently used. You could de-prioritize them, but they still need to exist and be very visible. Hiding categories is not a good idea.

Redoing the interface with categories is probably acceptable, considering how people use them and how they are not designed correctly in that interface. Things like category prioritization and single categories as opposed to multiples, these would make things easier from certain perspectives.