Adding Categories

Overview

The admin page for Categories has been modelled very closely after the WordPress Categories admin page to provide you with a familiar experience when managing your categories in Connections. So if you already know how to add and manage categories for WordPress posts, you already know how to do the same in Connections. If you are not familiar, this tutorial will walk you through the basics.

Categories gives you a way to organize your directory entries into different groups and those categories can be nested into hierarchies. For example, say you are creating a musician directory and you would like to assign musicians to their genre. You would first create top level or root parent categories for each genre and then add the sub genres as children or nested categories. To illustrate, this is how it may look:

  • Country
    • Classic
    • Bluegrass
  • Pop
    • Indie
    • Soft
  • Rock
    • Alternative
    • Christian

Tip

You are not limited to one level deep when adding your categories. A child category can also be a parent category. There is no limit on how deep you nest your categories but if the hierarchy is more than a few deep you might want to reconsider how your category hierarchy is structured.

Tip

Categories are sorted by their name, if you would like to create a custom order then you need the Custom Category Order extension.

Tip

If you need to quickly batch import hundreds or even thousands of categories at once, learn how to use the Category CSV Batch Import Tool.

Adding a Category

To add a category to your directory you must first navigate to the Categories admin page.

To add a new category simply add the category name as you want it to appear on your site in the Name field and then click the Add New Category button. The other fields are optional. If you would like to learn more about these optional fields see the Categories fields documentation.

Adding a Child Category

 Adding a child or nested category is just like adding a regular category. The only difference is that would would select its parent category from the Parent drop down field before clicking the Add New Category button.