Lullabot podcast talks about category

Exciting news, categoryi-ites: the awesome folks over at Lullabot have just released a podcast that talks about the category module! In particular, Jeff Robbins was very interested in the recent developments with activeselect-powered category selection, which essentially achieves his vision of a Mac OSX-like drill down system.

This is the best publicity that the category module has ever received, and I would like to express my deepest thanks to Matt and Jeff, for spending their valuable podcast "air-time" discussing it.

Lullabot didn't spend all their time praising the category module: which is more than fair, since the module ain't exactly perfect (what is?). They also weren't as knowledgeable about what the module does as I would have hoped, which I think reflects a problem with the module's logical functionality being too complex to easily grasp, and also the fact that the module is still quite poorly documented (an issue which I have been and am continuing to address little-by-little).

Matt Westgate expressed his concern about the category module attempting to "reinvent the wheel" of taxonomy, and about the fact that the underlying data structure of categories is different to that of taxonomies (although the latter is closely modelled on the former). I hope to help Matt, and many others, in understanding the advantages of built-in distant parentii functionality (which is what makes Jeff's drill-down vision possible), and of having categories and containeris as node types instead of as first-level data structures. I also hope that when Matt learns about the 'wrapperi' system, and about how it provides a full compatibility bridge with taxonomy and book (allowing many of those great taxonomy modules in contrib to work with category), he doesn't think it's too much of a hack. ;-)

Finally, the Lullabot crew also expressed their concern that new developments, such as the referencing support in the CCK module and the relationships / metadata module (I think they mentioned this one?), would overlap with the category module, and perhaps act as better alternatives to it. I sincerely hope that the category module has a place in the world of Drupal 4.7 and beyond, and also that it is able to work in complement with modules such as CCK and relationships, rather than in competition with them.

I look forward to this podcast bringing new users to the category module, new developers to the project, and new documenters to this site.