I have a site called Exhibitions that contains many many subsites each of which is an individual exhibition (with pages, images etc). I would like to attach to each of these subsites a property which indicates whether it is a past exhibition, current, or future. I know I could do this with property bags, but that is out, as the setting must be made within sharepoint (not designer) by someone nontechnical. I know I could put a list in each of the exhibition subsites that has a single status column.... and truthfully this is the way I am thinking of going. But I am also considering using social tags (applied to the default.aspxs of each exhibit), as we do not use them for anything else.
I will need to create a control that pulls out and displays (depending on what parameter it is passed) all links to the current, future, or past exhibitions as quickly as possible. I know if I use the list method the control will have to traverse all the exhibition subsites looking in the list I have created there with the status field. If I use the tag method the control will use SocialTagManager.GetUrls (I presume it can do so within a particular context, i.e. the Exhibitions parent site).
Like I said I am leaning toward the list method, but the tagging method seems like it could work well. The one disadvantage I thought it might have is in ordering. I would want to respect site ordering in the navigation settings which I can do if I traverse the subsites. I do not know in what order GetUrls will return.
One thing I don't like about either method is that is is not easy to see (within sharepoint at a glance) which site is classified as what.