Continuing yesterday’s work, internal support for #categories is finished. The result is basically a lightweight layer on top of the existing hashtag-based system.
Now whenever you create or modify a post, or move it to a blog, we’ll parse out the hashtags and automatically create categories from them, as necessary. Categories store original information about hashtags, plus a user-friendly title (which can include spaces, punctuation, capitalization you want, etc.) and a URL-friendly slug. (You can see some of the underlying code here.)
In this way, they’re completely optional and unobtrusive by default. If you care to carefully manage your categories, with this new system, you’ll be able to do it. If you just want to tag a post occasionally, this won’t slow you down. And if your needs change as you write more posts, this will be there when you decide to organize things.
I still have more testing to do before deploying this change, and even then, users won’t notice anything new yet. But the groundwork will be there for us to tackle the management side next.
Thoughts? Discuss...