Thread

Just starting with EE, and up to Chapter 4 in Boyink’s (great) tutorial book. Having some challenge in trying to grok what Categories are / do.

I’ve been looking in EE doc’s, forums, etc., and elsewhere on the web, but haven’t found a basic (but informative) characterization / explanation of Categories, beyond something vague like, they’re useful in Channels. E.g., User Guide tells you how to make and group them, but I’m not getting a strong sense of their semantics.

Any (somewhat detailed) conceptual overviews, succinct definitions, and / or illustrative examples, greatly appreciated, especially on this (Thanksgiving) day of gratitude. Or afterwards, for that matter.

- Carl

Categories can do a lot for but not all of them too well. So don’t depend on them for everything.

Think about categories as filters that you use to parse your entries and pages content. So if only want news content on a business site you can use the category parameter in the channel entries tag and you should get only news articles.

If you want a more specific example in your business domain, ask me a more specific question and I’ll try to help you out.

Hi Carl

We often use the built in system for EE categories in two main areas;

when we want to give our clients control;

- to add new ones or
- to apply entries (such as news articles) to one or more categories

We have a screencast video that may help demonstrate how the client would use this;
http://www.fusiondemo.co.uk/screencasts/editing/editing_-_categories/

To populate navigation menus or lists

In addition, navigation menus can be populated by categories. This is especially useful for e-commerce sites, where clients need to add new top-level or sub-categories and then have the navigation of the site update dynamically.

A good example is a site we built for World Guitars (worldguitars.co.uk) where there are many categories and sub-categories of product. An item may also be in a used or new category as well as a product name category.

Hope that helps

Mike

Thanks for the help!

I’m figuring that all (or at least a lot more) will become clear as I continue through Mike’s tutorial book.

For now, though, based on the above answers and some further poking around on my part, I’m guessing at something like the following as a rough characterization of the semantics of ‘Categories’:

Categories are labels, or (what in non-tag-language-programming contexts might be called) tags, that one can apply to pieces of content. These labels, once applied, can be used for grouping and (other types of) filtering.

Am I getting warm?

😊 - Carl

Yes - categories are just ways to group/filter entries.

Think of them as a club.  If two entries are assigned to the same category it’s like two people belonging to the same club. Each person can also belong to other clubs and likewise with entries.

EE has a blogging heritage, and it’s category functionality is an artifact of that.  Think of a weblog index page with a number of entries and a list of categories in the sidebar.  Clicking a category filters the list in the main content area.

Categories have URL implications - EE needs either an ID or category URL title appearing in the URL to know how to filter the list.  Categories have hierarchy - but only for display of the category list, that hierarchy doesn’t appear in the URL.

Thanks Mike!

And sorry I didn’t respond sooner. My (new / young) company needs to configure the correct email so that I get ping’d when someone replies.

BTW, the reason I ‘came back’ and noticed your reply here was that I asked another question just now about trouble seeing the ‘show toolbar’ link, from your Building an EE 2 Sm. Biz Site. My ‘content-manager’ member (Ch. 27) doesn’t see it, although a super-admin does…

(Can I cross-reference?) I believe my post about this new question is at http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/206905/

Best wishes,
- Carl