hello
I am actually building up the following: a community website which features pictures that were submitted to contests and I would like to have your opinion in order to know if there would be better ways to do something. Also, my brainstorming in setting it up may give people ideas.
Contests happen on a regular basis: "The Foo Contest 2006 edition", "The Foo Contest 2007 edition", "The Bar Contest 2004 edition", etc.
I created a "Contest name" free tagging + non hierarchical + single + required vocabulary.
I created a "Contest" content type that requires a term from the "Contest name" vocabulary and that has a CCK date field. Then I used auto_nodetitle.module to automatically generate a title for the node using the "Contest name" term and the date. This way, I am able to easily create "contest instances" where each "Contest" node is an instance of the contest designed by its term in the "Contest Name" vocabulary. As you can see, at this point this is taxonomy that builds a relationship between all the instances of the same contest.
Then I created a "Picture" content type that uses imagefield, imagecache and used nodereference to model a parent-child relationship with the "Contest" content type. I am still wondering which should be used for that: I did not like the node relativity module that much, maybe the new outlining features in D6 could help.