In a previous article, we gave a broad summary of how the classification regime of this site follows the faceted metadata approach used by Tanya Rabourn.

This method uses Regular Expressions to allow category names such as "Themes: Knowledge sharing", "Themes: Social software", "Vision: Smarter" and "Vision: Simpler" to be displayed in groups without the section titles. Brad Choate's regex plugin enables Movable Type to strip the text in front of the colons out of the category names.

However, we still had to solve the problem that Movable Type will sort category names alphabetically. This is not usually a problem, but our corporate strapline is "Smarter, Simpler, Social" and we have a category for each. However, Movable Type will display these categories in alphabetical order, which is not what we want.

The addition of a point character in the regular expression in the following code:

<MTAddRegex name="patt1">s/Vision.: //gi</MTAddRegex> <MTCategories> <MTIfMatches var="CategoryLabel" pattern="m/(Vision.:)/i"> <a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryCount$> entries"><$MTCategoryLabel regex="patt1"$></a> | </MTIfMatches> </MTCategories>

means we can add a character to our category labels "VisionA: Smarter", "VisionB: Simpler", "VisionC: Social" and we can fool Movable Type into displaying the categories in the order we want them.