Implemented Better categories in XF

Rigel Kentaurus

Well-known member
I remember in the old UBB days (and which later vb.org copied), we use to have categories by area ...
home page, forum list, thread page, member page, private messages, admin​

That was pretty cool, actually, as it enabled me to just "shop" for add-ons. One day I would wake up and say "what's available to enhance my showthread" and I would start browsing that category to see what I could to to make it more interesting.

"Other" is pretty bad, imo
 
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While I agree with you to a degree, I think those categories don't work at all. Or at least, they need to be a little more granular than "pages" but rather "systems". Some transcend those, which is tricky.

I'm open to suggestions though.
 
While I agree with you to a degree, I think those categories don't work at all. Or at least, they need to be a little more granular than "pages" but rather "systems". Some transcend those, which is tricky.

I'm open to suggestions though.

In the lab, we do something called a "Card-based" approach to usability. What we do is the following.
We take a group of users, give them a list, and ask them to categorize it. The natural categorization of the list for the normal users is the one we end up using.

While I won't do it for everything, I did it for the current most popular and came up with

Nodes As Tabs 1.1.1 Enhancement
[XFR] User Albums 1.0.0 b7 Big new features
XenMoods 1.1.3 User Experience
CTA Extra Colours 1.0.0 Admin tool
XenMedio Big new features
Highest-Posting Members Sidebar Enhancement


Other categories would be, for example, Performance
Of course some people would not know if they should submit their add-on into New Feature or User Experience. This is just a set of suggestions, though.

But really, anything more granular that "other" would be a good start for XF, especially since people are just starting to submit their add-ons as Resources

A longer, more elaborate solution, would be to have "tags", that way if some add-on cross-cut into different pages then it can just be tagged with all that apply. Something can be tagged showthread, forumdisplay and member if it enhances all those 3. Maybe that for a future version.
 
As you say, there's always cross-cutting. Only so much can be done about that. I think we've got a pretty good set of categories now. It certainly cleared out other pretty well.
 
xenforo.categories.RM.webp
Categorization in the RM is very unfriendly to users.
It is missing the categories that people want.
People want categories such as: Blogs, Galleries, Shopping Carts,

The category OTHER (now 72), as mentioned, is growing and unhelpful.

Other note: when I title search for "cart" in the RM, I don't get a hit on MicroCart ? That's pretty user unfriendly.
 
People want categories such as: Blogs, Galleries, Shopping Carts,


own categories for 2,3 addons? Do you really think there will be >10 blogs, >10 galleries and shopping carts??
Wouldn't this be MUCH MORE confusing to have a own category for these things?????

IMO the existing categories + thread prefixes would be much better
 
I think the RM design is the problem.
Limiting categorization on RM items to the sidebar is the major weakness.

If you read Rigel's post ... no one is going to come up with categories such as:
Other, Messages, Users etc.

I suspect people are just using The 4 Tabs (which are useful) and the search.
 
I've always wondered, what is new applications??

Also, recently having to deal with the mess of a ten year old database with keywords for 70k documents ++, I am no longer a proponent of user driven keywords. Cleaning it up afterwards is a near impossible task...
 
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Categorization in the RM is very unfriendly to users.
It is missing the categories that people want.
People want categories such as: Blogs, Galleries, Shopping Carts,

The category OTHER (now 72), as mentioned, is growing and unhelpful.

Other note: when I title search for "cart" in the RM, I don't get a hit on MicroCart ? That's pretty user unfriendly.

I've tried. I've suggested but to no avail on some of the graphic category's but of course you can only keep suggesting several times before you feel that sound suggestions are just being ignored. Personally, I find it ignorant and downright rude when your contributors are taking out the time to improve things. That said, I wouldn't expect anything less now. Kick and shout, suggest it'll do you no good.
 
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