I am hoping to get some feedback on how to best organize my archive.
The site in question: http://www.necrotania.com/eFiction
I have been running eFiction since version 1.0, when all we had were Categories. Here is my current list.
Fantasy Stories
Science Fiction
Short Stories
Poetry
Other
There are some sub-categories but I am thinking of getting rid of them.
Many years later it was suggested I add Genres. The newer Class system worked well for this, and I ended up with this list.
Angst
Fan Fiction
Fantasy
Horror
Mystery
Other
Poetry
Romance
Sci-Fi
Supernatural
My problem is duplication of some of the key items. One solution would be to change the categories to reflect a more general desctiption of the works. Here is an example list I came up with the other day.
Excerpts (Sandbox)
Short Stories
Novella
Books
Private (Member Only)
Just a very general list to try and get the concept across.
Outside of the work that will be involved (A nightmare of reclassifying all the stories, but that is my pain), is this a good way to make use of Categories or does having the current list make it easier to navigate to what you would be looking for?
My main archive had the same issue, being also from 1.0, and I've struggle also with changing categories. I've renamed them a little & moved their parent/child status around a little but generally kept them the same because of the nightmare of reclassifying the stories. The biggest categories are actually based on story length/completion status & there is like Poetry, Essay, and so on, so what I did was create a top-level locked category of Completed Fiction & moved the original Long & Completed and Completed Short Stories into it. Maybe there is a way to do something similar with your site.
http://dracoandginny.com/browse.php?type=categories
No doubt the logistics of this change will be a nightmare. After some basic sorting I am still looking at migrating my two main categories, 448 and 118 stories respectively. It will give me a chance to also clean up some of the character encoding issues I have picked up over the years thanks to accidental flipping between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. My inexperience in the past with bridging caused some issues.
I like how you have it setup on your site and it is along the same idea as i want to go with. Do you allow multiple category selections with the way you have it?
Edit: Scratch that...for some reason I thought you could disable allowing more than 1 category for a story. Never mind 😉
We don't technically allow multiple categories on a story, but it's not disabled either. It's not a priority mod for me. Plus we validate all submissions so the people who look them over usually correct it when people submit to multiple.
Thanks for the feedback 🙂
I think I have decided to go forward with the reorg. So far I came up with the following list of categories.
Poems - Pretty much the same as the category we have now
Lyrics - For the more musical members. It will probably share much with Poems
Flash Fiction - Small works. The 10 word stories would fit perfectly here.
Short Stories - Smaller stories designed for 1 sitting
Novellas - Larger than Short Stories but not novels. Wiki defines this as below 20,000 words
Novels - The big boys.
Sandbox - Replacement for the "Other" category. Fragments, works in progress, notebooks
Member Only - Private Member-only area. Filters like the mature rating but does not require the rating.
The addition of the member-only category (see my posts in the modification forum on that) means I will still have to allow more than 1 category selection. Overall I am fine with that.
Making the change will be an issue of locking the transitional categories, creating the new ones, and them moving one story at a time. I could automate it a bit but it would be much more accurate if done by hand.
