Made some good progress today. After going over several potential implementations of Sections on paper, I finally ended up with a solution that I think is the simplest. Also nice is that this solution does not require adding any tables to the WordPress database. While I wouldn’t have a problem with that if the plugin necessitated it, it’s also nice to KISS every once and awhile 🙂

So far, testing out this implementation seems to be working pretty well. I’ve added a drop-down menu to the Add Post page to allow the post to be assigned to a Section. Once the post has been published, it is then viewable via /section_name/post_name

I’ve also decided to implement tagging (using Christine Davis’ Ultimate Tag Warrior 3) in lieu of categories simply because I find it faster to add tags to posts rather than categories. I also like the lack of hierarchy and the potential for tag intersections to drill down results.

Also, I’ve pretty much got my mod_rewrite rules setup for Apache.

So, all in all, a pretty productive Sunday afternoon! 🙂

I still have the task of getting WordPress to spit out my desired URL’s without too much hackery (would very much like to have WordPress’ own the_permalink() template tag to produce the goods to improve compatibility with other themes).

Also on my to do list:

• Refine display of Posts in their Section (Make it more template-oriented)
• Displaying Posts in a Section filtered by a tag (or tags) – ala /section_name/tag/photography+japan/

I’m currently building it as a plugin/theme just to speed development, but I’m hoping to get it all packaged into a nice plugin once I’ve got it all worked out.