Traditionally, WordPress has used to methods to help people create a taxonomy around their posts. Categories offer a rigid structure and tags offer a more flexible, albeit unstructured option. It was possible to use the Custom Taxonomy Plugin to extend this concept further but with WordPress 2.8, it becomes very easy to add these custom taxonomies to your standard build using just a couple of lines of code.

So, let’s have an example how these custom taxonomies can be used. Let’s say you’re creating a blog for a Fort Myers photographer who would like to talk about the various photo shoots she’s taking part in. She may want to group her posts around a structure that helps people identify what the theme of the photo shoot was, what sort of equipment was used and what sort of subjects were in her photos. You can create 3 separate taxonomies, one for each of those categories and WordPress will support the tagging and displaying of those taxonomies natively.

It’s a great move forward for increasing the flexibility of your blog. Read all about it in Justin Tadlock’s post.