I'm just in the trial period, but the lack of blog categories could be a deal-killer for me. I've got thousands of pages of content developed over the past decade to get online, at various membership levels and I don't know how else to organize it. If members can't express a category preference (say, "accounting") they could never find other articles on the subject.

Need to be able to tag in blogs. Tags are a basic feature of blog software. They provide a refinement of search. I hope this is a relatively easy feature to add. Wild Apricot blog has tags... ;)

~ dawn

PLEASE blog tags and categories. Even Wild Apricot's own blog has tags!! Why can't we?

The lack of tags to blogs is a major complaint with our lobbyist as many news items in state legislation affects different topics and should be shown on those blog pages in addition to the Legislative Update News blog.

Yes please. We have been waiting for this. I hope it will be added soon.

I agree that blog tags and maybe categories are a must have. I will outline how I think I would use them on the website I am administering since I’m not getting a clear picture from the comments that span several years here.

The website is for descendants of a common ancestor that are interested in staying in touch, sharing their common history, maintaining a living family tree - 7 generations so far and growing, and co-ordinating & holding family reunions.

For this site it is important for the members themselves to be able to add content that can be easily organized and viewed. So far it seems to me that blogs might be used accomplish that.

If members could categorize and tag blog articles, the blog articles could show up in blog gadgets geared towards specific categories - “Back in England”, “Moving to Canada”, Original Homestead”, “Ranching in Alberta”, etc with the tags being used for filtering the articles in that blog. Not really sure if hierarchical categories are something the site would make use of, at least right away.

Another feature of the site is that every descendant has a page in the family tree, I would like to be able to place a blog gadget on these pages that would display any blog articles tagged with that person’s “id”, so that it becomes a collection of stories around the person. A single blog article could show up on several family tree page blogs if the story includes several people.

Something that would be really awesome would be when a member adds a blog article to a specific blog gadget, the article is automatically tagged with the category or tag being displayed by that gadget. The member could also add additional tags.

Categories (and maybe tags?) could also be used by the Recent Blog Posts gadget, rather than just blog titles.

This might also be completely achievable using only blog tags.

yes, this is a definite must have for blog functionality.

Just want to emphasize all of this. This should be a standard function of blogs. How can we get this into the queue for implementation? The way it works for events is perfect, can it not be replicated for blogs?

The ability to categorize blog posts--and then be able to sort and display posts by category--is something people have been requesting for years and should be considered basic blog functionality. As it is, older blog posts quickly get buried and never seen.

If you agree, please comment.

Great news about tags and categories for blogs and posts.

Will it be the same for general page as well

Thanks

Tags are in our short list for analysis

Both tag cloud and categories are absolutely necessary for any blog. For an example see the open source blog app BlogEngine.Net

I realize that WA has limited resources and the CMS system has taken priority, but I would hope that once the new release has been completed you will give your blogs a little more TLC. Blogs are a great way to provide news to members and to get feedback with comments. If this info cannot be properly organized and accessed it is effectively lost!

Yes, thank you. We will consider this during analysis.

[quote user="Apricot Kernel"]

Can you please elaborate this? How would you use categories and tags, what is the difference between them for you and why you need them both? This would help us to design it properly (when we are ready for this)

[/quote]

Categories are topics and tags help break the topics down into micro-topics.

We don't have a lot of posts right now, in part because of the limited functionality of the Wild Apricot blog. However, I'm currently writing an ongoing series of "A Peek Behind the Curtain" posts that cover the daily life and processes of our Board of Directors. It would be nice to be able to categorize them as (for instance) "behind the curtain" and then tag them by Board position. That way someone could find all the posts in the series, AND/OR could also filter them according to which Board role they were specifically interested in.

That's just one example.

To summarize a bit further, if one's bloga s a whole is comparable to a book on a particular subject, then the different chapter topics equate to categories, and the sub-sections within (and potentially across) chapters equate to tags.

Does that help?

[quote user="gljudson"]CATEGORIES and tags - not just tags - really are a requirement for any sort of serious blog. When can we expect this?[/quote]

Can you please elaborate this? How would you use categories and tags, what is the difference between them for you and why you need them both? This would help us to design it properly (when we are ready for this)

Sorry, it would be later than that - our main focus for the next ~6 months is to finish the CMS redesign in version 5 so we are putting everything else aside.

Will the blog tag/search function be addressed in 2012, or early 2013? This would be a very useful tool for many of my client websites as we use the blog feature more and more.

We have begun to use the blog more often. It seems that we need to have a way to tag / categtorize the blog.

If it is not going to happen? How do we patch in wordpress or blogspot in order to keep our blogging moving forward? Any suggestions would be apprecited,

Thanks

CATEGORIES and tags - not just tags - really are a requirement for any sort of serious blog. When can we expect this?

We definitely need blog tags as we need the organization to easily find articles of interest as quick as possible.