Does anyone know if there is an extension, hack or otherwise for the following?

1: Show categories as drop-down selects rather than multi-selects in the Control Panel’s Publish and Edit forms?

2: Alternatively, can it be hacked to limit the size of the one big multiselect box to a few rows so it scrolls.

3: Is there a way of labeling each category group with the group’s name/label? In the big multiselect, each list isn’t even labeled with the group name, so the client doesn’t find it at all easy to find a group and then select a category.

Ideally, I need to separate categories into clearly labeled groups (shown side-by-side or one above the other) and then either shrink the multiselect boxes to a few rows or convert to drop-down selects (only ever need to select one thing from a cat group on this job).

As it is now, all groups are combined into one mega-multiselect, with grouped categories separated by a dotted line, like so:

Item A
Item B
etc (millions more cats)
Item Z
- - - - - - -
Item 1
Item 2
etc (millions more cats)
Item 327

And so on. Not good from a usability perspective.

Any tips welcome on this one.

OK, in cp.display.php

Removing “.size.” (which makes the multiselect have as many rows as you have categories) and replacing it with a numeric value results in a multiselect set to a certain number of rows (I have used ‘20’).

But, I would still really like to split into a separate multiselect for each category group, and label each group with the group name.

Getting there. To split groups into different multiselect forms…

In cp.publish.php, replace…

With…

So, this exchanges the dashed group divider <option> with a select footer and a new select header.

Anyone know if this will screw anything up further down the line??

Now, all I need is to name the Category Groups above the multiselects!

dude that is fantasic….SUPER WORK i hope the EE folks with build that into EE (the seperate group part)
many thanks my friend i owe you one.. lol i would even pay for that little tweak.

Again: many thanks !!

edit: seriously, pm a staff to add that into the code

Oe almost forgot,
you might want to add that the modification has to be done in: cp.publish.php

i was looking all over in cp.display.php

This is pure sweetness.  Thank you Erskine.  I wonder if there’d be a way to handle this through an extension instead of a direct hack though.  Regardless, I’m using it as is and very thankful for it.

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KEYWORDS: (so other forum searchers can find this thread much faster/easier than I did) 

categories publish edit tab plugins modules add-ons multiple admin control panel form several select
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This is just gorgeous, heh

Totally using this with every project

Hope that Ellislab integrate this into EE itself

Just what I needed

Has anyone, or CAN anyone, convert this to an extension? What happens when there are say, 5 category groups? Can this work with Cocoaholic’s “Category Checkboxes” extension?

I’ve found that Erskine’s modification can dramatically improve Publish/Edit page performance when there is a large amount of categories. I had wanted to use ~1000 categories for a particular weblog (don’t ask, please. I’m not happy about it , and found that my browser was likely to lock up with that many categories.

For me, anyway, this modification stops my browser from freezing, and makes the page a lot more manageable.

Just a note that if you’re using (or trying to use) the Required Category extension, it won’t work when the categories are broken up in this way. Also doesn’t work with Category Checkboxes from Cocoaholic, obviously.

I tweaked this by changing “$size” to a definite number - in my case, “20”.