Due to the fact that discourse has a limited level of category nesting, it would be great to display the tag along with the categories. That is, child categories and tags could be combined and visually they did not differ.
Let’s say you have a “Smartphones” sub-category and in this category you would like to break topics into separate subcategories. But the level of nesting of categories does not allow this. Thanks to tags, this can be done. But for the convenience of users, these tags must be displayed as subcategories. As far as I know, this is not possible now and only a subcategory can be added to the category.
It is clear that the tags displayed together with the categories should have their own description, photo, icon, banner and some settings that will be similar to the category settings. Hopefully someday it will be in the future
Something similar was searched for earlier:
In general, only tags that are used within a category will be displayed on the tags dropdown. So it already works very similar to a subcategory drop-down:
You can further adjust this by using tag groups and then restrict/require tags from these groups using the tag settings on each category:
If you want more visibility for tags, you could for example try the right-sidebar-blocks component with the popular tags block: Right Sidebar Blocks
I know that. But from the point of view of usability, this is a crutch, the tags are hidden somewhere there, and not, for example, next to the categories on the main page. There is no structural integrity. Users need to have a lot of experience with discourse to use tags for navigation. Even in this community, I have never navigated the site using tags. I think I’m not the only one.
Configuring the sidebar partially solves this issue, but again, the tags are separate and the categories are separate. The user will not immediately understand what is more convenient for him to use and where to move. It takes time and experience to customize the sidebar for yourself.
This is a feature request, not a support question. Hopefully someday we will be able to natively apply tags along with categories.
They’re separate because they achieve separate purposes. Topics can have one category but many tags.
You might be able to author a theme component which visually confuses the two, but this borders on user hostile.
As you already concluded in your other topic, Discourse probably isn’t a fit for your project.