Thanks for your positive feedback and for taking the time to look back through the support forum to find the earlier WooCommerce topic regarding taxonomy issues. Thanks as well for the link to your site and the detailed explanation of your goals.
You wrote “when I open an image in the editor I can see all the taxonomies pertaining to the WC products” Does that mean you added support for the Product Categories and/or Product Tags on the Settings/Media library Assistant General tab?
You asked “Is there any way that when I assign those categories in the WC products they automatically propagate to that particular image in MLA?” You could develop a small custom plugin along the lines of the woofixit.php.txt example plugin I developed for these this earlier topic:
Bulk addition of image alt tags to WooCommerce Product Images
Your application is somewhat different but the ideas are the same. Automatic synchronization of the Product and Image terms can also be done by hooking some of the filters provided by MLA, as in this recent toic:
mla gallery tagged image to post featured image
Again, the specifics are different but the concept is similar. The same approach would work for your other solution of “an identical set of all taxonomies that mirror those in the WC products“.
You also asked the key question, “Btw, is there any advantage using taxonomies made only for the MLA usage or it’s better to use those already made for WC products?“
WordPress uses its Categories and Tags taxonomies for posts and pages. WooCommerce uses its Product Categories and Product Tags for its Product custom post type. MLA lets you add support for these and any other custom taxonomy to Media Library items. As a convenience, MLA also provides the Att. Categories and Att. Tags taxonomies for Media Library items. The decision to use common taxonomies or separate taxonomies depends on your application. I have seen people who have strong opinions on either side of the issue, but most people use the separate Att. Categories/Tags.
WordPress core has a lot of code that hard-wires a separation of Media Library items (attachments) from posts and pages. For example, here’s a topic about front end search:
does this allow a user to search for pdfs from the frontend?
The separation extends to taxonomy “Archive Pages”, as in this topic:
Att Categories menu returns 404 error
You can see this if you navigate to the Products/Categories submenu. There you will see a “Count” column that shows how many Products are assigned to each Category. If you click on the number you will see a Products submenu table with all Products assigned to the term. If you use the Product Categories taxonomy for images as well as Products, the count will reflect both Products and images but if you click on the count you will see only Products. It can be a mess.
Whatever choice you make, some code can be developed to keep Products and images in synch. This works best, of course, when each image is associated with exactly one Product. Sharing an image across Products will cause confusion.
By the way, “attaching” images to products is another application aspect to consider. Attaching images to Products is separate from using an image as the Product Image or an element of the Product Gallery. Enforcement is uneven and it can be another source of confusion.
I hope that gives you some good information to consider as you plan you application. Thinking it through before you load up your database will pay off!
You remarked “I want to use some powerful and an eye candy galley plugin, maybe “Gallery” by WebDorado“. I did a quick investigation of that plugin and want to give you a word of caution.
MLA is designed to be as WordPress-like as possible. It uses all the Media Library structures and APIs, is compatible with the [gallery] shortcode, uses WordPress custom taxonomies, etc. WebDorado’s Photo Gallery plugin takes a different approach. Like NextGEN Gallery, it has its own logic for galleries, albums tags and so forth. It is very powerful, but it probably won’t work well with MLA. Here’s a topic about NextGEN:
NextGen???
I know that’s a lot of information, but I hope it helps. I will leave this topic unresolved for now in case you have further questions along similar lines. Thanks for your interest in MLA.
