[development] content types. posts. post settings.

[Eric Goldhagen]

At 10:23 AM -0800 11/10/06, Neil Drumm wrote:
>Eric Goldhagen wrote:
>>  At 1:15 AM -0800 11/10/06, Neil Drumm wrote:
>>>  I would currently consider any use of the words node, taxonomy, and term
>>>  in UI text to be bugs. These are post/content, categories, and category.
>>
>>  I feel that is not true. Category is but one expression of taxonomy.
>>  Taxonomy is far more complex and powerful than a simple category/tagging
>>  system and calling it such is good. Talk to any information
>>  professional, such as librarians, and they will tell you that taxonomy
>>  is an important term/concept and drupal gets much credit for using that
>>  term instead of dumbing it down as "categories"
>>
>>  I've had more than one opportunity to develop on drupal because the
>>  system is called "taxonomy" and therefor implies much more complex
>>  possibilities than if it was called tags or categories.
>
>Before we decide how we make these language choices we really have to
>figure out who is/are Drupal's audiences.
>
>The complete and answer to that is: we are a bunch of contributors with
>individual goals, and are collectively writing for the sum of our
>individual audiences. Unfortunately, that definition doesn't get us very
>far.
>
>We do have some useful data for the recent administrator's survey, which
>Kieran, myself, and others are working on writing up in the most useful
>and presentable way. This will tell us how Drupal administrators
>self-identify.
>
>For the problem at hand, convention and existing implementation tell us
>that category is the preferred word at the moment, so we should use it.

I agree totally that changes to language need to be done only after 
careful deliberation and discussion. Discussion on who the audience 
is we are all building for would be an interesting place to start.

But, as to your last point that convention and existing 
implementation tell us that category is the term to use, I'd counter 
that with the same argument.

Existing implementation and convention is for the link to taxonomy 
administration to be called Category (to clear up confusion for new 
users), but that the module and system are referred to by Taxonomy to 
fully and accurately define what it does and what is possible.
I think this is not a bad inconsistency, but valid to bring new users 
along a learning curve.

--Eric
-- 
-------------------------------------------
Openflows Community Technology Lab, Inc.
New York | Toronto | Montreal | Vienna
http://openflows.com
People are intelligent. Machines are tools.