I would like to make some topics sub-topics of others.
Say I have “Topic A”. On the Topic A page, I will put a button to “create sub topic”. That will allow the user to create a new topic, “topic b”. topic b would be a child of Topic A.
What this means, from the user experience, is:
I could also have a button on the Topic A page to “view all the child topics of Topic A”, and this would go to a list of Topic A’s child topics, such as topic b and any other topics that are children of Topic A.
What’s the best way to do this? (I’m assuming I’ll have to do it in a plugin, which is fine.)
Note I’d only be looking for one level of subtopic down, not several.
Here’s some detail on the possibilities I think could do it:
Categories (though this probably is not the best way to go)
Categories would provide similar functionality to what I have in mind, but that could get too heavy once there are a decent number of topics with subtopics (it seems like overkill to basically have a new category for each parent topic).
or
Tags
The best I can think of right now is using tagging. So that when you click “create sub topic” on Topic A, it opens up a new topic, and I programmatically add a hidden tag, like “Topic-A”, that links to Topic A. Then when you click “view all sub topics” of Topic A, it does a search for the tag “Topic-A”.
This seems pretty clean, other than the fact that there will be a lot of tags (basically one tag for each main topic, which could end up being a lot).
or
Custom Fields for Topics
Another possibility I’ve considered is to create a custom field for topics, which would be an array of the ids of that topic’s sub-topics. This also could work, but would probably be slightly more complicated to code.
For example, I’d have to update the main topic’s custom field only after a subtopic is created; and, I’d have to create a new kind of search–searching for all the topics within the main topic’s custom field array–instead of just using the pre-built tag search functionality.
Is there another solution I’m missing?