Thread

Hi all,

The Category Checkboxes Extension is a checkbox replacement for the categories multi-select box on the Publish page.

I never really liked multi-select boxes (in general), and find myself explaining other people (clients) how they work quite often, hence this replacement option.

This extension has one more added benefit.
After clicking the Edit Categories link on the Publish page, changing categories and closing the popup window by clicking the “Close Window and Update Categories in PUBLISH Page” button, it will automagically reselect the categories you had selected before.

Download link

If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know!

Cheers,
Elwin

EDIT 20080712: updated to version 1.1.5

Very nice indeed, Elwin! Alternating backgrounds is a nice touch as well.

Absolutely invaluable! 😊

A fantastic addition. Whilst I don’t mind using multi-select boxes as you say, explaining this to clients can become a real pain and personally myself I would also rather use checkboxes. I mean, even developers can accidentally let go of a shift or command key at some point and then you lose everything.

Excellent extension. Thank you.

Best wishes,

Mark

All of my favorite extensions are yours!  I use this on a front-end form (from the wiki) and it’s great.

A better pattern indeed. Good thinking.

thank you, thank you, thank you 😊
thank you, thank you….

happy day!!! what an excellent start to the week.

PS did I say ‘thank you’?

I guess for simple blogs it doesn’t really matter wether an article is miscategorised or not, but for sites where:
1) the correct categorisation of weblog entries is important
and
2) multiple category selection is required
then this extension is a life saver! This area has been the one thing that made me nervous about EE as it was so easy to accidentally loose categories.

Thanks for the nice words, appreciate it.

But it does not work with: Multiple Columns For Category Groups

Correct, although a very nice one, that is a hack.
I could probably come up with a version that works with that hack, but it requires another hack to that hack… and some cash 😉

The interface is a little confusing because both groups are labelled “Group.” I’m assuming the first group is the Default Category Group and the second is the Other Group, but it’d be clearer if they were labelled that way.

Hi kirkaracha,

Yes that would be nice.

The reason they are not labelled that way is because that information isn’t available on the publish page.
I’m looking into getting the correct group names in there, and make that optional… whish me luck!

ps, Is ‘Group’ really more confusing than ‘nothing’ for the first group and ‘———-’ for the second?  :ohh:

If there are multiple category groups, and if you can’t get the names [which is obviously best], then one possible approach might be to have something like:

  category_group_1
  category_group_2
  etc

instead of
  group
  group

I’ve just tried out the extension in anger in an EE 1.6.0 instal and it works really nicely and picked up existing categories as promised. 😊

one general question - are there any requirements in terms of EE versions?

Hi ‘Jan’,

I have already added Group Names to my development version.
I’ll update the online version tomorrow.

The extension was tested on 1.6.x but I’ll test lower versions as well.

this just gets better and better 😊

Just updated to version 1.1

This version adds Category Group names to the headers, you can also choose to turn them off if you like.

Download link

Very nice addition. Thanks for doing this.

Hi Eliwin,

Sorry to be a pain but I absolutely love this extension but for some reason I cannot see the ‘Edit Categories’ link below the categories when I have this extension turned on. If I turn it off and revert back to the standard EE way then the link is there. I am logged in as a Super Admin so not really too sure what is going on here.

Do you have any ideas as to why this might be as I love using this extension but not being able to add new categories when creating a new entry is a real problem at the moment. It’s probably just me and I bet no one else is having the problem but please please please someone help!!!

Thanks.

Best wishes,

Mark