Help me decide how to organise my content

  • darossa

    (@darossa)


    9 years, 11 months ago

    Hi,
    I’m new to WordPress, but have tried in the past some times. I own this site http://notasdeaula.org, which consists on full class notes in a law school in Brazil. The site is purely HTML and CSS; almost no images and no javascript at all. I’m not sure this is the most suitable area in the forum for this question, please let me know if I’m in the wrong place.

    I have finished the course so I don’t think the site will get new updates or new material, but still I’d like to make it more good-looking and functional. That’s why I’ve begun trying WordPress in a localhost.

    The Law Course in Brazil lasts five years (ten semesters); with 4 or 5 subjects per semester, and in each subject we had about 25 to 28 classes. Each class has a title (topic of the day), and the teacher, naturally, discusses a number of specific subjects, concepts and keyterms every day. As you can see there is an organising pattern.

    Example: in the 7th semester we study the subject of Family Law, which is a subtopic of the greater field of the Civil Law. One class in that semester is about Parenthood Investigation, and during the class the teacher discusses the ‘parenthood investigation lawsuit procedure’ and the ‘DNA testing’.

    The idea of adopting WordPress is taking advantage of the database functionality so the other students could search and find classes and other information more easily. In the above example, I could find a way to sort the classes by semesters, or by subject name; I believe this would be a category (maybe they’ll be as many as 40). As for the specific topics, like the investigative lawsuit and the DNA procedure, they would be tags. I already foresee the site will consist of hundreds of tags. So if in the future the DNA test is mentioned again in another subject, by another teacher, then these two classes could share that tag.

    I’d also like to make it more flexible to change the appearance with the themes.

    So, to begin with, how would you recommend me to sort those information in my site? I know there are only categories and tags, will they be enough?

    Thanks!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • blacklinemedia

    (@blacklinemedia)

    9 years, 11 months ago

    Hi

    Sounds pretty simple really. I would organize your years, semesters, classes and subjects as categories. You could do some modifications and create a custom taxonomy (http://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies) so that you can break up your data a bit more. But if you want to keep things simple I would just leave them as categories and use wordpress’s hierarchical structure of categories to your advantage (e.g. Year 1 has a child category of semester 1 which has a child category of family law).

    I would not use tags to organize your data. Think of tags more like keywords. So for instance say there is a famous case that is referenced in lots of different lectures or a theme that is referenced in lots of different lectures (e.g. mens rea). Then you can add it as a tag, and then when you view the tag archive you will be able to see a list of all posts with that tag.

    Cheers,
    Alex

    Thread Starter darossa

    (@darossa)

    9 years, 11 months ago

    blacklinemedia, thanks a lot for your answer!
    I’ll consider the thing about the tags, but turns out I believe they’ll be used exactly in the way they were meant to be, except that I’m intending to use many, many of them.

    So, in order for me to use the categories as you mentioned, it would be nice if I could let the reader see a page containing a list of categories; a sidebard widget wouldn’t be helpful in this case since there will be many. How can I, then, create a page (static) with a list of categories (and maybe with tags too), accessible by the reader?

    🙂

    J M

    (@hiphopinenglish)

    9 years, 11 months ago

    Here are a couple of Codex links to help you plan how you’ll present a “Categories” page.

    wp_list_categories

    get_the_category_list

    Other than that, I’d search the web for a couple of sites with similar content to yours, and draw off them for inspiration.

    blacklinemedia

    (@blacklinemedia)

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @darossa Take a look at these two plugins, for creating custom post types, taxonomies and views for displaying them.

    http://wp-types.com/home/types-manage-post-types-taxonomy-and-custom-fields/

    http://wp-types.com/home/views-create-elegant-displays-for-your-content/

    Here is a link the to Codex page about custom post types: http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Types

    Thread Starter darossa

    (@darossa)

    9 years, 11 months ago

    Gentlemen/ladies, thanks a lot. I’ve written down your tips and links in my Evernote so I can access them later while I implement the ideas. The problem is that I have a lot of arm work to do now until the new site is online. So thanks 🙂

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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