I've never seen this on another blog, and I'm not sure whether it's because no one ever dug into the edit categories page, or if people just don't see any use? But the categories you attach your posts to are a tree; it's just that everyone makes each category a root node.

Have a look at my blog, though - it's easy to arrange your categories into parents and children. And I think that's a lot more user friendly - meaning to your readers - than a list sorted alphabetically. As ugly as tag clouds are, they at least give you some info about which ones are more important, or at least have more behind them. I like this approach, though, because really everything I write about falls under a few "branches."

If you want to experiment with this on your site, go to manage, and categories underneath it. Click edit, off on the right, for a category you'd like to be a second-level node, and select a parent from the drop down. Repeat until you have your navigation structured the way you want. Then check out the category list when you write a new post.

I never really had any reason to mess with my category structure, but still interesting to experiment with. This same hierarchy style can be applied to your site's pages as well.

That's way cool!

I don't know how it would apply to my site though?

Isn't that listed in the WordPress features? I didn't know that it was such a special thing... :P

I've never actually seen it used, though. I've never read the feature list, actually ... I chose Wordpress for the themes, and the popularity/support. So this is news to me.

think that is a worpress feature, but i could be wrong

Originally Posted by idkwot

think that is a worpress feature, but i could be wrong

Um, isn't that the whole point of this thread, to say that it's a WordPress feature...

Yeah ... I didn't have to go under the hood to mess with PHP; this comes out of the box.

Ok, I'm just getting into these category hierarchy options for my new blog, so I'm wondering:

Is it a good idea to checkmark both category levels for it to count?

And should I *show* the "category parent" categories in my sidebar (as the categories beneath it are already covering those sub-portions)?

Also @Forrest - I noticed your hierarchy is shown by indents, is that just theme-specific, or did you set something unique in your options?

Hello All -

Hey Forrest nice photos! About displaying both Parent and Child categories... my recommendation would be to show both. That way when you click on a "parent" you get a sort of master archive of all posts in the sub categories (child categories).

At WebHelperMagazine.com, we use the child category for a "sub blog" as a section of the magazine. So, my OS WebMaster blog is listed as a "child" of the OS WebMaster category.

Yours -
Scott

I'm going to use my blog as an example to answer these ... because it's a concrete example. And one at least I'm familiar with.

Originally Posted by jamestl2

Is it a good idea to checkmark both category levels for it to count?

My most recent post, about a road trip to the Olympic Mountains, is filed under Olympics and national park. If you click the travel category, a grandparent it's not actually filed in, the post shows up. So I tend to only check the most specific categories a post fits into.

Originally Posted by jamestl2

And should I *show* the "category parent" categories in my sidebar (as the categories beneath it are already covering those sub-portions)?

I do. Sometimes I only file something at the top level ... using travel as an example again, I have a tag called wanderlust ... sometimes I write about traveling to nowhere in particular. I want these to be easy enough to navigate to. I also want all posts I've written on a subject to be available, apart from the rest of the posts: somebody might want to see gear related posts, but nothing about geography.

Originally Posted by jamestl2

Also @Forrest - I noticed your hierarchy is shown by indents, is that just theme-specific, or did you set something unique in your options?

I hacked the theme up. Wordpress uses unordered lists to render most of the sidebar, so I gave each of them IDs in the php. It should be sidebar.php, except my theme only uses three files, so it's in the main page template. From there, I used css selectors to indent only the list items in the sidebar:

ul, ol { margin: 5px 0 20px 0px; list-style-type: none; }

.entry ul, .entry ol { width:540px; margin-left:25px; }
.entry ul, .entry li { list-style-type:circle; }
.entry ol, .entry li { list-style-type:decimal; }
#sidebar ul, #sidebar li, .commentlist li { list-style-type:none; }

li#categories h2, li#archives h2, li#meta h2, li#blogroll {
    padding: 0;
    color:    #3B322F;
    font-size: 12px;
    font-weight: bold;
}

That probably could be cleaned up a bit... I had to specify everything about the entry list items - which shouldn't be the case if I was more specific with the first line - to get my Primer on Night Photography post to render properly.

Great post Forrest, thanks for the info

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

I hacked the theme up. Wordpress uses unordered lists to render most of the sidebar, so I gave each of them IDs in the php. It should be sidebar.php, except my theme only uses three files, so it's in the main page template. From there, I used css selectors to indent only the list items in the sidebar:

ul, ol { margin: 5px 0 20px 0px; list-style-type: none; }

.entry ul, .entry ol { width:540px; margin-left:25px; }
.entry ul, .entry li { list-style-type:circle; }
.entry ol, .entry li { list-style-type:decimal; }
#sidebar ul, #sidebar li, .commentlist li { list-style-type:none; }

li#categories h2, li#archives h2, li#meta h2, li#blogroll {
    padding: 0;
    color:    #3B322F;
    font-size: 12px;
    font-weight: bold;
}

That probably could be cleaned up a bit... I had to specify everything about the entry list items - which shouldn't be the case if I was more specific with the first line - to get my Primer on Night Photography post to render properly.

I've been delving into my widget presentation, and I discovered that under my "Categories 1" widget, I was able to configure a "Show Hierarchy" checkmark box, and it automatically sorted (and indented) everything alphabetically for me. (Saved me hours, instead of hacking my sidebar.php file directly )

So it could help you (or anyone else using hierarchal categories) out if your using widgets in your theme .