New feature request: inactive categories

  • Unknown's avatar
    emma515621 · Member ·

    I am finding the support for categories a bit limiting, and would like to request a simple new feature that would make my life a lot easier!

    I am using my blog for a distance learning degree and have created a very large hierarchy of categories and subcategories to categorise my posts into the relevant course modules.

    Each time I start a new module I create a new set of categories corresponding to each section of the module. I don’t want to remove the categories for the old modules as they are still useful for searching for posts, but likewise I don’t really want them appearing in the categories list when I’m creating a new post as I am never going to use them again and it makes it very hard to find the one I want. Similarly when I’m setting up new menus (which I base on categories), I have the same problem.

    It would be great if there was a way of marking categories as ‘inactive’. This would mean that they can’t be used for new posts and won’t show up in the list. When creating menus, by default the inactive categories wouldn’t show up there either, but perhaps there could be a check-box to allow inactive categories to be added too.

    Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions :)

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    wppolandcom · Member ·

    Hi Earand,
    Thank you for the suggestion. It’s not possible at the moment to deactivate particular category or set of categories.
    You can always use the search tool in WordPress admin panel to find a proper category and just remove it. Then the posts attached to deleted category would fall into default one which is defined.
    With some customization which is not available here, at WordPress.com but on the self-hosted website (using WordPress.org scripts), you could do such a modification to hide certain categories from displaying on the list.
    I hope that makes your understanding WordPress better.

  • Unknown's avatar
    emma515621 · Member ·

    Hi there,

    Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately in my case I’m not able to remove the categories as I still need them to organise the old posts.

    Support for categories is definitely an area that could be significantly improved, and I’m sure that other people would also find this useful. At the moment it’s not really setup to support large numbers of categories – another example is that when you’re setting up a new menu, the list of categories to choose from is displayed in a tiny box which makes it very difficult and frustrating to use.

    I think it’s a use case worth considering anyway for future development anyway :)

    Cheers,
    Emma

  • Unknown's avatar
    wppolandcom · Member ·

    Hello Emma,
    Thank you for your reply.

    I understand your embarrassment, but right now what you need is not easy to implement and is not available. I think that in future if this won’t become a part of WordPress.com core, a custom plug-in would be used, which the developer could add to the WordPress plugins repository and possible it might appear here in WordPress.com plugins library as well. In this case, the plug would be available in the pay plan or as part of a dedicated theme.
    Regarding the menu, the recently used categories are suggested by default, so it is easy for the editors of your blog to find a proper one. I understand that it does not meet all your expectations, but I also hope that someday you will locate the solution you need.

    Also, I strongly encourage you to be active in the Ideas forum: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/forum/ideas where you can add your own perceptions and ideas for developing WordPress.

    Best,
    Mariusz

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