Transcript:
In this video, we're going to take a look at categories and how they can help you organise your
content in ways that can make it easier for your readers to find the information they're looking for.
Let's edit the local events news item over here on the right. About halfway down, it's a categories
box. There's one category called uncategorised. WordPress must always have at least one category. It
can be anything you want but there must be at least one. We're going to change this post from being
uncategorised to having a good category.
Now it's about events, so I'm going to click add new category and there we are. Now I can uncheck
uncategorised and click update.
Now, on the front of our site, you'll note that, under category, it says events and over on the
right, under the categories widget, it lists both. If we click on events then we go to the archive
page for events, and right now we only have this one but we could have all of the posts about events.
We can also have child categories. So let's say we're going to have an event about music. We can
choose events as the parent category, click add new and now we have events and music. On the front
of the website you can see that this is in both events and music.
Now here we have events, music and uncategorised. So within events you could have a collection of
music posts - and people can view that page - and bookmark just that one. So if they're only
interested in music events in your town, then they can say this page and come back whenever they
want.
I'd also like to point out the web address here. It's "/category/events/music" so it's easy for
people to read and understand where they are on your website.
Now there's another way to manage categories. Over on the left, under posts as a categories, link in
here. We can edit, quick edit, delete or view. If we edit, it takes us to a page like this and we
can change the name, the slug, the parent and we can put in a description. The description may or
may not show up on the front of the site. Let's put one in here.
Now let's go back to categories and now we can choose the view link. Look and you'll note that it
does not render the description in this theme but it might in another theme. Right here we can add
categories. If you don't need to put anything in to parent or description then this can go very
quickly because slug is automatically created. So, for example, I can simply type construction and
hit enter and now I have construction. I can type growth and hit enter and now I have growth. So you
can very quickly add in a number of categories here.
Now let's go back to our posts. It's possible to choose quick edit, put the posts into the category,
unchoose on the categorised and click update. Or you can click edit, come down here and you'll see
all the categories listed here and you can simply choose one.
Now if we reload our homepage, which is a post archive, then you'll see the first one is in events
and music, then we have growth and then we have construction. Over here on the right you'll see we
have these categories. Now categories that don't have any posts won't show up in this list.
There's one more thing I'd like to show you on the categories page. On the right here it shows how
many posts are in that category and if you click it, it takes you to the editor for just that
category and you can see right here the filter that is set up to show us that. That makes it very
easy to simply find all the posts in a certain category and then if you wanted to change all of
those posts to another category you could bulk edit and put it in another category.
Categories are only useful if you use them. Well, if you use them poorly, they can actually be a
detriment to your site. So think about the structure that you want to use. Think about how people
are going to be looking for information on your website. Make a good structure and it can really
help people. If you make poor structure it can actually confuse them quite a bit. You don't have to
use categories, you can simply leave one category for all your posts and take this widget off
altogether and categories simply become irrelevant on your site. But once you have a fair number of
posts, categories are a good idea because they help people find what they're looking for.