Is there a way to create an exlicit relationship between two posts in WordPress regarless of what categories those posts might be in?
The idea is that within the post template it would be obtain and list the related posts for the current post.
I'm guessing you could achieve this using tags to group posts together, but that seems to be a hi-jacking of the tag system for a purpose for which is wasn't designed.
Any ideas?
Would adding post IDs as meta data help? I had written a quick hack to display the Digg box for posts that were submitted to Digg. I was manually adding a digg_url meta field with the Digg URL. Perhaps you could add multiple related__post fields and add some code to iterate through all and render post links? Are you looking for a more automated solution?
Maybe I didn't catch the point, but Categories are not just there for that purpose?
I may have miss understood the question. But tags, archives and categories are there to "connect" posts, on the basis of that common connection.
Other than that, I can only see ...
Manually linking posts from with the text of a blog post or
Using plugins. Two I user are similar posts (http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/) and SEO Smart Links (http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-smart-links)
Similar posts if highly configurable and allows the blog to automatically suggest "related posts" and SEO Smart Links, links (in post) words or phrases to related posts.
All the best
stephen