Blog categories

[mstenta]

We discussed adding the ability to "tag" or categorize blog posts.

In a technical sense, we could fairly easily create a category property in Front matter, we would just need to decide how to present those separate categories in the navigation and other UI elements.

https://farmos.discourse.group/t/work-proposal-support-for-community-content-on-farmos-org/1265/3

[jgaehring]

Just to clarify on this point a bit further and summarize what we originally distinguished as category as opposed to tags...

If I remember correctly, category was more the type or format of a post, rather than just descriptive keywords of the content. So tutorials vs user stories, etc. Took me a minute to find it, but here is what @ludwa6 originally posted in that same thread, which I think is spot on:

In any case, considering this GUT (Grand Unified Theory) of documentation, i would advocate for adopting its 4-square classification scheme for the different types of doc, i.e.:

1. Tutorials
2. How-To Guides
3. Reference resources
4. Explanations

However you might choose to implement it (tags, subdirectories, etc.), i think it is really helpful to be clear about the qualitative diffs across these 4 forms of doc, both in the authoring, and in the InfoArchitecture that should make them most easily accessible, depending on UserNeeds.

The key to this would be to have some tight restrictions on what we called those category, basically restrict it to an enumerable of type String, and only one of course, as opposed to tags which could be a list. That would allow us to group them into their own sections of the website in the main menu or filter by them in the main index of blog posts. It would also aid in maintenance for certain time-sensitive content.

Of course, that could be done simply with a different directory, or you could just filter against the date property, or like I suggested in the past, you could even take a more targeted approach by defining some Frontmatter properties to specify what version of a project a tutorial is meant to work with:

projects:
  - name: farmOS
    versions:
      - 2.0.0
      - 2.1.0
  - name: Field Kit
    versions:
      - 0.8.2
      - 2.0.0-alpha.1

The idea was this could achieve something like what DigitalOcean does in their tutorials:

So yea, no shortage of ways to skin that cat.

And just for reference if anyone wants to implement category or tags or any other Frontmatter properties, you just need to update the GraphQL schema here:

farmOS.org/gatsby-node.js

Lines 93 to 100 in a9f544e

	type Frontmatter {
	author: String
	canonical: String
	# Date is the only required (non-nullable) field.
	date: Date! @dateformat
	slug: String
	title: String
	}

More info on how to customize those types here:

https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/reference/graphql-data-layer/schema-customization/

[mstenta]

category was more the type or format of a post, rather than just descriptive keywords of the content

Yes! Good distinction. Maybe we can consider "tags" in the future too... but categories would probably be a good first step.

Love the other ideas you describe too @jgaehring!