[Resolved] I am trying to understand taxonomies.

[Author]

Posts

[johnH-30]

For a menu I would need categories. e.g.

Boat Types
Power up to 25'
Power over 25'
Sailing up to 30'
Sailing over 30'
Speed Outboard up to 20'
Speed Outboard over 20'
Working Outboard up to 20'
Etc etc
So these are categories, do I group these as a taxonomies?
Thanks for any clarification.
John

[Nigel]

Hi John

Categories themselves are a fairly generic example of a taxonomy, which are sufficiently vague that they can be used in many scenarios.

But sometimes it makes sense to be more explicit about your taxonomy, and it may also make sense to have several taxonomies, rather than a single general-purpose taxonomy.

So you could have a "priority" taxonomy, whose terms might include "urgent", "high", "normal", "low" etc.

You could have a colour taxonomy, with terms like "red", "blue", "green" etc.

That would illustrate a feature of WordPress categories as distinct to WordPress tags. WordPress categories are hierarchical rather than flat (like tags).

So a colour taxonomy could be hierarchical, e.g. parent term "red" with child terms of "burgundy", "scarlet", "crimson" etc.

A more practical example might be book genres, with parent terms like "Fiction" and "Non-fiction" and child terms like "Crime", "Historical", and "Science Fiction", or "Biography", "Science", and "Politics".

Looking at your examples, it seems like you might actually have two taxonomies there, i.e. "Propulsion" and "Size", where "Propulsion" has terms "Power", "Sailing", and "Speed outboard", and "Size" has terms such as "20 foot", "30 foot", "40 foot" etc. (or as ranges, whatever makes sense).

[johnH-30]

My apologies for not returning to your very helpful response.

So would I be correct in thinking of Taxonomies as a heading for a selected group of categories?
Many thanks

John

[Christopher Amirian]

Hi John,

No, Category is one type of taxonomy.

So a taxonomy can be a category or for example a type of something or whatever you want to group things together with.

I suggest that you check:

https://toolset.com/course-lesson/using-custom-fields-vs-taxonomy/

and:

https://toolset.com/course-lesson/creating-a-custom-taxonomy/

And finally:

https://toolset.com/course-lesson/when-and-why-you-should-use-custom-types/

Thanks.

[johnH-30]

My issue is resolved now. Thank you!