WordPress Categories Explained

WordPress Category Management Guide: Organize your articles easily

WordPress websites with a large number of articles require effective classification management. This article will guide you on how to manage WordPress classifications, including adding, editing, deleting categories, and using WordPress's own components to customize how to display the classification list.

Core points:

• WordPress classification is crucial for organizing articles and easy search. You can add, edit, or delete categories in the "Category" submenu under the "Article" menu in the background.
• Adding a classification requires providing a name, alias (URL-friendly string), parent classification (if any), and description. You can also add categories when writing new articles.
• You can edit categories in the same "Category" submenu, all categories are listed there. The Quick Edit option allows quick changes to the name or alias of a category.
• WordPress provides a default part called "Category" to display a list of categories on a website. This part can be customized to display hierarchy, article count, or even as a drop-down list.

Classification Management

WordPress provides a page dedicated to managing categories in the menu of the backend management panel. More precisely, this page can be accessed through the Articles submenu, named Category.

Two ways to add classification

After accessing this page, you can see a form called "Add New Category" on the left. The first field in this form is marked as "name", as the name implies, is the name that your article category displays on the website. The purpose of other fields is not necessarily obvious. First is "alias". As described below the field, this string is very useful when you enable URL rewriting to get a URL that is readable to the website page. For example, suppose you set "category" in the permalink settings (in the "Settings" -> "Permalink" menu). Then, if you enter "my-life" into the new category alias, the visitor can use the URL https://www.php.cn/link/5c3165e90eb8727c7dd0f9434cbd2bba!

After adding a classification, we can notice that there is another way to add a classification: when you write a new article (or edit an existing article). In fact, when you choose to place the category of the article, you can find a "Add New Classification" link that allows you to add a new category by simply pointing out the name of the category (and if necessary, its parent). The alias will then be its cleaned name and its description will be empty. However, you can still edit this category and change it later.

Edit category

You can always edit categories to update their information. Categories can be edited from the same page as before (in the Categories submenu of the Articles menu). You will see your category list on the right side of this page, similar to the list of articles in the corresponding page. Click on the name of the category and you will be redirected to another page containing a form that has been pre-filled with the current information. You just need to modify the required classification and submit the form once you are done. If you just want to change the name or alias of the category, you can also select the Quick Edit option that appears when you hover over the category.

Delete the category

Next to the Quick Edit option, we found the Delete option. If you want to delete a category, click this link to confirm your selection and you are done. You can also select all categories you want to delete and select Delete in the Batch Actions list. Beware: Deleting a classification is not an undoable operation. Please note that deleting a category does not delete articles that use this category. If these articles use other categories, the deleted categories will only disappear from the list of categories they have used. If they do not use any other classification, they will belong to the default classification called "Uncategorized". Note that this is why this category cannot be deleted (but you can still edit it).

Show the components of the classification

Like Link Manager, WordPress provides a default part for displaying a list of categories anywhere in your topic. Let's test it by accessing the Part Manager from the Appearance menu. This part, called "Category", allows you to customize its display with four settings. By default, the title of this part is set to Category, but you can change it by entering the title of your choice in the Title field. The other three settings are check boxes that allow you to customize the category list. Note that no matter what you choose among these options, only categories containing at least one article will be displayed (if we forget the "parent effect" explained below). To explain the Parent Effect, we start with the last option: Show Hierarchy. This option is useful if you set some categories to parent of others (see the wonderful examples above about your life and your goldfish). As you might have guessed, by activating this option, WordPress will show the exact hierarchy of the classification. Without this option, all categories will be displayed in a column without any relationship between them.

When this option is activated, the hierarchy will appear as a nested list.

When you activate this option, you must consider an effect: it will be displayed even if the parent itself does not contain any articles. For example, the two screenshots above are taken using the same configuration, the same article, and the classification. The "parent" category itself does not contain any articles, but its children contain them, so WordPress displays it in a list to show the hierarchy. This is an expected effect, but it is always a good thing to know how it works. The second option, marked "Show Article Number", is relatively clear: it adds the number of articles included in each category in parentheses.

Pay attention to "parent effect" again: the parent category displays the sum of the number of all its children. Finally, the first option: "Show as drop-down list", allows you to display the category list as a drop-down list. This option is especially useful if you have many categories. Your visitors must open the list and select the category they want to view. WordPress will then automatically redirect them to the correct page. Note that this option is compatible with the other two options: the hierarchy and article count can still be displayed in the drop-down list.

Summary

Classification is very important for organizing your website. Now that we have learned how to add, edit and delete categories, there is no reason you don’t organize your articles! If it is important to know how to manage categories, the most important part as a developer is the question: How to retrieve these categories? How to list them? How to display information about a specific category? The answer to this question can be found in Using WordPress Classification API, an API that combines some functions that can perform the actions we just listed. The good news is that the classification API is the subject of our next post!

(The FAQ part in the original text is omitted here because the content of this part does not match the pseudo-original requirements and is a direct copy of the original text.)

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