Categories

From Textbook

Content sub-tabs:

Figure 1: Admin tabs menu showing active "categories" tab.

In this tab you define categories for your articles, links, images and files.

Categorising things makes it easier for both you and your visitors to keep track of different kinds of content. You might, for example, have a category "software" in which you write about your experiments with the latest programs and another category "pets" in which you post stories about your cats.

organise subtab

Article categories

Article categories allow organisation of articles by their subject matter. Once categories are assigned, lists of articles belonging to particular categories can be browsed. It's similar with link-, image-, and file categories: you group things together by their type or subject in order to make it easier to organise them or to display them in a way that makes sense to your readers.

Create a new category

To create a category you simply type its name in the textfield at the top and click "create". Textpattern then adds the new category to the list.

Some changes might occur if you've chosen a name that has more than one word or if your language is not English: special characters such as umlauts (ä, ö, ü) are converted into replacement characters (e.g. ae, oe, ue, respectively) and individual words are linked with hypens. Category names are also converted to lower case letters.

For example, persönlich will become persoenlich and about me will become about-me.

The reason for these changes is that category names can be part of URLs and Textpattern makes sure that a category name contains only characters that are allowed in URLs.

Edit an existing category and category details

However, Texpattern keeps the original names. Just click on a category name and you get to a new screen with three fields:

category name
parent category
category title

The category name is the one used in URLs and other technical purposes. It contains no special characters and no spaces.

Parent category can be defined to create a hierarchical category structure although, as of this writing, there's little use for them because there is no native way to filter or display them in their hierarchical structure. There are, however, some plugins that take advantage of nested category lists.

The category title is your original title with special characters, spaces and all. This is the title that will appear on your pages if you use tags such as <txp:category1 />, <txp:category2 /> or <txp:category_list />.

These fields exist for all four kinds of content (articles, links, images, files) and exactly as just described for the article categories. However, the tags mentioned above (<txp:category1 />, <txp:category2 /> or <txp:category_list />) are only for article categories. For links, images and files there are other tags or tag attributes. See the tag section for details.

Delete one or more categories

Let's go back to the category list in the organise tab.

There's one more function there: you can select each category by clicking the checkbox next to it and with the widget at the bottom of each list you can delete the category/categories.