We’re importing several attributes from another CMS that could be used as categories or custom fields. These attributes are things like price, color, size, etc. Some are single value, some allow multiple values.
I’ve been thinking about pros and cons of using categories. Is it largely a semantic hurdle that an attribute like price ($, $$, $$$, $$$$) can/should be expressed as an EE category?
What is the best practice?
The things I’m evaluating are
* how much code we’ll have to write for either method (searching for entries, iterating top and second level attributes)
* site performance (database and code complexity)
* UI intuitiveness for our content authors
My opinion is that using categories to represent attributes is leveraging functionality for a feature that is meant to represent site hierarchy. I’ve seen people abuse tagging modules because they’re the easiest means to create relationships. This feels a bit like the same thing.
We’ve already written some code to accommodate things like searching against several custom field values for entries, dynamic urls for custom field name & value.