Best ways of categorising/tagging properties of entries?

Question

I'm setting up ExpressionEngine to list a variety of holidays. We'd like tickboxes to store "tags" about these entries.

For example, a holiday might have multiple departure months (e.g. it could depart in January, February, and April). It might have a certain duration (14 days, 7 days, etc.), or it might be seasonal (Summer/Winter/Spring/Christmas).

My holidays will be Channel Entries, so what's the best way to categorise this information within the channel entry, ideally so that it can be filtered and pulled through individually to entry pages at a later date?

• Should I create a Category (e.g. "Season") with Category Items (e.g. Summer/Winter/Fall)
• Should I create a Status (e.g. "Season"), with Statuses (e.g. Summer/Winter/Fall)
• Is there an Addon that would work best for this kind of thing?

Thanks,

Jack

Answer 1

It really depends on how you're going to filter the entries. Categories would work if you're going to rigidly filter by specific months, durations, and seasons (ex: output holidays that depart in January, or that are 14 days long). Just have one category group per filter type (Departure Months, Duration, Season).

However, if you need to filter based on a custom range (ex: output all holidays between Aug. 8 - Dec. 15), then you'll likely need a calendar add-on, like Solspace Calendar, that stores information in timestamp format and allows for recurring events.

Answer 2

I don't think you should use Statuses for this purpose, these are good to handle workflow related labels and they should be kept that way in my opinion.

I think that you can either use categories organised in category groups (ex:Season, Duration and Departure) or a mix of categories and perhaps Low events http://gotolow.com/addons/low-events, in which Low Events would handle the duration and departure. As kgrote said it depends on how you need to filter the entries.