I just don’t get it, what’s the point of categories?

I think of them as large tags, the ones that you use all the time. If you were posting about books think of them as the fiction/non-fiction type of split.

Once you categorise posts you then have access to standard WP functions that allows you to display posts by that category eg: Category Widget.

Categories and Tags gives you a way to classify posts in two different ways. As Kersti mentioned if you were classifying books you might end up with the following categories:

– Fiction
– Non Fiction
– Reference
– Religious
– History
etc…

And if you were going to use tags – you might have something like the following:

– Author #1
– Author #2
– Yellow cover
– Red cover
– Hard back
– Soft back
– Year published
– Publishing house
– etc…

R

Categories are very broad items that you use over and over and over again. You probably want about a dozen or two (dozen) categories at most.

Tags are a finer sort for items that are not used that often. You can have hundreds or thousands of tags.

Take the forums here for example. Each forum would be a category and then each post can have tags that are applicable to it but not to the forum as a whole.

Such as the Plugin and Themes forum (like a category), may have a tag for kubric theme or a tag for wp-dtree plugin.

Good explanation lokrin2000!

R

ah ha. very helpful. thanks everyone!