Note: you may also want to refer to:
- Linked-In Course Section: “WordPress 5 Essential Training – Add categories and tags“
- Linked-In Course Section: “WordPress 5 Essential Training – Sidebar: The difference between categories and tags“
- Design Guide “Posts: Formatting“
- Design Guide “Posts: Template“
Applying “Categories” and “Subcategories”
- Think of “Categories” and “Subcategories” as the way we control what posts display on what pages. Yes, they can be used as search criteria, but for editors, use them to control where they display.
- Categories have a parent-child relationship to Subcategories. Here, when the same principle applies to both Categories and Subcategories, I’ll use “C/S”.
- Posts can appear on any page using the “Post Grid” block (PGB). PGBs can display one or many posts and in multiple columns – 2 columns on a page is good, 3 columns is pushing it on a page with a sidebar.
- PGBs display posts from ONLY ONE C/S! But a single Post can have multiple C/S selected for it (don’t use too many, 1 or 2 should suffice)
- To display posts from different C/Ss on the same page, use a separate PGB for each C/S.
- A PGB with a PARENT Category selected, will display posts from the Parent Category AND the posts of its SUBcategories … which means that, over time, the Parent Category post might be superseded by newer Subcategory posts.
- You can “pin” a post to the top of the PGB to keep it there as long as you want.
- Re: “Tags.” We’ll work on tags soon. Think of tags as subject matter terms that may occur in posts from many different, unrelated C/Ss (e.g., “dance”, “XR”, “video”). They can be useful to users as search terms, but not so useful for controlling content display.
Here is a sample page using a version of the DC Home page layout that has been converted to use all Post Grid Blocks (PGBs): Welcome to the Duderstadt Center.1 As you assign your posts to categories, you can see how they will display. Note the Section heads are using the same names as the C/S. So you should get some sense of how your selection of C/S will display in any given PGB.
Working Draft of Categories and Subcategories for the DC website
The chart below is embedded from the original here: Posts: Categories Draft Proposal 2021.03.24. Please edit in the Google sheet at the above link. The chart below is updated automatically every minutes.