Blender gives you total control over how you name materials and textures. Although this freedom may be liberating, your material naming style can soon become messy or confusing. This is particularly so if you are working in a production environment where many blendfiles may need to be produced, and several months may elapse between working on a particular material, or object that uses a material.
Even if you are working as an individual, it is amazing how quickly one forgets how a particular material was named. Unfortunately, there are no easy buttons in Blender to automatically organize materials and textures. You will have to develop your own methods that suit your type of production. However, we can discuss, and begin to develop good practice, through this recipe, and show some guidelines for material and texture naming methodologies.
These are not set rules, and you are encouraged to adapt them to your own requirements. However, the following methods have...