Content classification best practices - subcategories or tags?

Hi,

I would like to understand what is the best practice in flexicontent for classification of content where items are included in multiple sub-categories and need to be filtered in tag-like fashion, allowing items from multiple categories to be listed at the same time.

Option 1 - subcategories - has advantage of "composition" relationship between categories and subcategories
Question: is there a mechanism to optionally select listings from multiple sub-categories while browsing parent category?
Option 2 - tags - has disadvantage of "aggregation" relationship between tag and item, no relationship between tag and category
Question: how to limit tag groups per category?
Many thanks

Michal

Hello

do you suggest that we limit tags per type ?

Hi,

In my case the items are of the same type in all categories. Limiting tags per type would not help me.

However if you could limit tags per category, that would help me a lot. Is it a feasible approach? Can you make it an enhancement request? Or would you instead recommend to go with subcategories and investigate a way to use the subcategories as a filter - to display items from multiple subcategories at the same time?

Thanks

maybe do not use sub cat but flexicontent field like an select multiple and cascading option

Interesting, I will keep the categories and will create a DB table with "tags per category" and use SQL selector in multivalue field to get them (based on {item-> catid} instead of cascade).

More questions:
* is there a shorthand for retrieving secondary categories? (like {item->catid})
* is there a recommended approach for filtering item list by field value? can I show the field options in a module as checkboxes and use that for filtering?

many thanks!

for filtering you can :
- use filtering module
- display filter in categorie view
- create a link to a categorie with filter (auto or forced) like idfilter##value idfilter##value1+++value2 etc ... see popup description