Is it not possible to simulate category hierarchies using tags alone?

aligajani

I want something like this:

Photography
- Diploma in Photography
-- 2017-09-13
--- Lesson 1
--- Lesson 2
--- ...

I see that we can apply tags on all these and organise them when the user is posting, but if you see Vanilla forums, it supports categories which are an entirely different thing because tags=labels where as categories=hierarchies.

I think tags make sense if someone is posting with a topic label like Canon, Nikon on the Lesson 1, but posting a thread in Lesson 1 with the tag of Lesson 1 just doesn't make sense. It will mean we have to manually compose hierarchies through the tagging system.

How do you guys approach this problem? We basically want hierarchies of information (via categories) and nesting. Is this even the right tool for the job because we wish not to hack it if other tools are offering this out of the box?

clarkwinkelmann

Tags in Flarum are meant to be used as categories I believe, and it seems to work fine in many scenarios.

If you configure your tags as primary tags, adding a second level tag automatically adds the first-level tag, so it does behave like categories in this case. You can limit the number of tags of each level, so I think it's hard for users to mess up the hierarchy if you setup that correctly.

By default it's not possible to go deeper than 2 levers, but this should be possible to change via an extension.