Tags vs Posts Conundrum

[pentastich]

I have a slightly non-typical situation. I'm using Publii to reimplement an existing website. There's no requirement for the sites to look the same, but I don't want to egregiously change the structure either. The site is for a rowing club, so its natural to represent individual programs as Publii posts, and broader categories of programs as Publii tags. For example, we could have:

• Youth Program Overview (tag: Youth)
• Juniors Winter - On-water (tag: Youth)
• Juniors Punchcard (tag: Youth)
• Youth Learn-to-row (tag: Youth, tag: Learn-to-Row)
• Adult Program Overview (tag: Adult)
• Masters (tag: Adult)
• Adult Learn-to-row (tag: Adult, tag: Learn-to-row)
• Adult Social Strokes (tag: Adult, tag: Learn-to-row)

It all fits nicely, and I can put the Youth, Adult, and Learn-to-Row tags into a "Programs" gallery post with a little template work.

But… not quite, because we also have Adaptive Rowing and Private Lessons, which are posts, not tags, but need to show up along with the Youth, Adult, and Learn-to-Row tags on the Programs web page.

I could attempt to work around this by creating a Publii post for each of the Youth, Adult, and Learn-to-Row tags. Content-wise that's pretty easy, and, since the high level structure doesn't change often, it's not even much work to maintain. And it has the advantage that I can easily work in more complex content that tags pages normally have.

There are two problems with that approach, however:

1. The first is that I'm now left with a bunch of orphaned "tag" pages for Youth, Adult, and Learn-to-Row.
2. The second is that the tag links on the posts point to the "tag", not the "tag post".

I wish that one of two features were available:

• A way to specify that a custom post (not a page) should be used instead of an automatically generated tag page. This would be similar to the way that a Publii "page" can be used instead of the automatically generated home page.
• A way to assign a tag to a tag, so that I could say that the "Youth" tag was also a "Program".

I realize that both of those approaches would conflict with Publii's internal organization, where "tags" and "posts" have very different metadata (e.g., tags have "name" and "description", while posts have "title", "custom_excerpt", and "text").

What I'll probably end up doing is creating a custom template for the "Programs" page (the one that includes Youth (a tag), Adult (a tag), Learn-to-Row (a tag), Adaptive Rowing (a post), and Private Lessons (a post). That a brute force solution, but would be work, and. in practice, would almost never change, so maintenance won't be horrible.

Still, I'd love to know if there's a better way.

Any thoughts?

[michaelfluegge]

in short terms: A post is what holds the content (https://getpublii.com/content-writing/). A tag describes the post.

For example, if you write a post about 'adaptive rowing' and add tags like 'Youth' or 'Learn-To-Row' or both or any other tag which describes the post/what the post is about. "Publii uses Tags, which are keywords that apply to a post. A post can have multiple tags attached to it, so even if your post covers many subjects readers will be able to find it." (https://getpublii.com/docs/tags.html)

Tag pages are generated automatically.

I suggest visiting the Simple Theme site (https://demo.getpublii.eu/themes/simple/v3/). If you open a post and click on one of the tags, you'll see how it works.