This isn’t anything new, but I recently had an interesting realization. This concept would be a lot more powerful when coupled with Custom Taxonomies, which have been a part of WordPress since version 2.8 or so.

Imagine a movie-related blog. You could have a “Departments” taxonomy set up to separate posts into reviews, production news, upcoming release announcements, box office info, etc.. You then build your theme to separate these different content types into different parts of the site, each with their own distinct “look.” (Sort of like having multiple blogs under one site, if you want to think of it that way.)

Then you can have other taxonomies setup that allow you to tag a post with actor names, movie franchises, directors, etc.. These extra taxonomies could be used to create other sorts of templates. Want to create a landing page for updates about the “Harry Potter” franchise? Create a new template with spaces that pull data from the appropriate taxonomies, and style it how you want it.

If you poke around the CNET News site, you’ll get a good idea of what I’m talking about. All of the “blogs” that are all part of the greater site have their own different stylings, and posts have metadata that allows them to be displayed in different spots. WordPress could easily be used to build something like that.

Many of the posts out there, unfortunately, never explained in a clear manner what custom taxonomies were. They talked of how amazing the concept was, and things like that, but they didn’t lay out the concept so people could understand the concept.

Justin Tadlock has a comprehensive post, Custom taxonomies in WordPress 2.8, that explains the concept very well, and has pretty much everything you need to know. What’s coming in 2.8, what’s already in WP, code snippets illustrating the use of the Custom Taxonomy API, etc.

By default, WordPress comes pre-loaded with three taxonomies: category, post_tag, and link_category. The first two allow us to label our posts a certain way. The last lets us categorize our links. I’ll be showing you how to easily create your own and use them in this tutorial.

Each taxonomy has what are called terms. For example, all of your tags are actually terms that live within the post_tag taxonomy.

Essentially, custom taxonomies are groups of tags. Suppose you run a movie review blog. You could create a taxonomy for “Actors,” and WordPress 2.8 will add an “Actors” box to the Write Post page, where you can assign a term (i.e. tag) for each of the actors in the movie.

This will be very useful for large sites with more advanced functionality or massive amounts of content that need to be indexed thoroughly. You could turn WordPress into an IMDB clone without too much effort.

Not everyone has read everyone of your posts as they came out, and people often want to return to pages they’d read before.

Date-based archives aren’t any help. They may be the least-useful of blog navigation techniques. Sure, there may be times when you want to see the posts from a specific month, but not very often.

Search forms are great, possibly the best navigation method used on blogs today, but you have to know what so search before it’s of any use.

Then you have tags and categories, which have their uses, but are just another way to sort data. You need to have tags and/or categories on your blog. They help people find what they’re looking for, though if you have 3+ years of posts in your archives, it may still take awhile to find the posts worth reading.

The posts worth reading…

Essentially, you want a place to highlight your best work, the posts that everyone should read. While you obviously still have a lot of good stuff in your archives, to be unearthed by readers when they need it, this page would have the posts you want everyone to see right away.

Thinking about this, I ended up building my Featured Posts page, which is essentially a yearly archive of a “Featured” category I use for this purpose. Here’s how to set it up.

My Featured Posts scheme helps, but it’s not the ultimate answer. It’s just one piece of the blog navigation puzzle.