Tags vs Pigeonholes vs Categories

What is the comparison between tags, pigeonholes and categories (:question:)

How is each best used (:question:)

Is one 'better' that the others (:question:)

Thanks

They have in common, that they can be used to group content together, regardless even of the content's type. Some images, some galleries, some wiki pages, some comments and some blog postings can all be grouped together to "last year's wedding".

Tags Package is everything you'd read at Wikipedia about tags. Users input keywords, they are displayed as a cloud or as a list. They are non-hierarchical. Even del.icio.us like grouping of tags is not possible (yet).

Pigeonholes and Categories, on the other hand, are both categorization packages. The basic concept is a hierarchical one. Pigeonholes is fundamentally better than Categories. Look at Admin > Pigeonholes > Settings. There are many useful features to set.

Tagging feels more flexible than a categorization system, because you invent keywords to tag your content with while looking it or submitting it. Categories are normally thought up beforehand. Pigeonholes though has more features and modules. You can display content that belongs to each other in a side module, or you can apply a different site style depending on the category. Just a few examples.

A source of confusion might be, that Categories and Pigeonholes are both category-packages, but only one of them is named like that. The reason for that is the modularity of Bitweaver. There is not one package for each content type. "Packages are king" as it was once put. To handle images, you can choose Fisheye, Gallery2 (?), or write your own package (and name it as you like). That's why ever since the ancient times when Bitweaver started out, there can't really be something like "Bitweaver's image gallery package" or "Bitweaver's categorization package". Of course, if you come first, you can pick a nice name for your package. If you're writing a Tags package now or an Events package, there are two names that you probably wouldn't pick. Or, sometimes you'd rather extend an existing package instead of writing from scratch. Also Stars and Recommends, as well as Search and Ilike, are overlapping in functionality.

Thanks Laetzer - very comprehensive reply - I'll transfer it to The Absolute Beginners Guide 2.0 - ok?

One of the things I like about BW is its modularity - but choice can be confusing at times!!

One more question if you will....

If you had a mainly hierarchical wiki and a search function running on the site, would you need an 'extra' package to file the content (ie tags/pigeonholes/categories) in your opinion?

(I can see its benefit in a blog situation - tagging appears more funky than categories there, but categories are more 'organised' if you have multiple contributors.)

Well, wiki pages are usually non hierarchical. Do you mean structures, also known as 'books'? This feature is strange but useful. It's basically a category system only available to wiki pages. It does not do much more except filing certain pages together and putting them in a certain order, even nested. Basically like an image gallery in Fisheye.

I can't say anything special about Categories package, I haven't used it in years and I've never seen anybody working on it. Tags are easy to handle and work very well. It can't hurt to have them. If you only used the Wiki package and its structures/books feature, you might not instantly need Pigeonholes. Rather, if you want to group a structure together with an image gallery and a blog, and so on, and some single content items as well.

Blog postings are kind of pre-categorized, because they are usually placed in a Blog, which is like a channel. So, if you have a Blog called "Weddings 2006" with many postings in it, an image gallery called "Tasty cakes", and a wiki book/structure called "How to marry", you could group this into "wedding stuff" by some clicks in Pigeonhole's content+category matrix, as opposed to tagging each of the single content items. On the other hand, you wouldn't tag a blog posting "wedding stuff" if it's already inside a Blog called "Weddings", you'd probably tag "carriage, church, confetti" - neither of which would make an exceptionally great category, in most cases.

Tags VS Cats really depends on content and contributors. For instance, in my experience, if you have a project with only a few contributors, they tend to fall back to a certain fixed set of tags, which is pretty weird if you ask me. There could as well just be a sound and solid category system, work done.

The main way that I am structuring my wiki is to have it hierarchical, so that from the first page a person can make a choice and then, on any subsequent page, they can do the same.

I also want to create sideways content though too, so that a person doesn't have to return to the front page.

Some of my pages are orphan pages but all linked to on the front page at the moment.

So the way I see people contributing is to find the most appropriate page and add to it.

I probably haven't thought of everything to put a page up for though, and I am not sure how to handle that at present - whether I will let others add pages at random - guess I should, but not sure.

Structuring the wiki is mind boggling in itself but I want to understand it and do it right, from the beginning so that I don't have to go back and tag or categorise, if I should have been doing that anyhow.

I am also going to have a go at collating pages into wiki books.

Does someone here specifically have a wiki that uses tags so that I can have a look at how it works, and whether they use a search function too?

I have installed phpbb at present but I don't think there is any cross-referencing between the two, so it doesn't matter for that.

I do want to have users contribute images and files, so perhaps tags are a good solution for this?

Later I will be using newsletters.

In my dreams I'd like to add an e-commerce package, e-cards, email subscription services, service scheduling etc!