Configuring Categories and Subcategories

Updated on August 20, 2017

WordPress categories and subcategories provide an easy way to organize your posts and give you lots of flexibility for showing specific posts. In technical terms, a category is one of the predefined WordPress taxonomies.

Example: When you have a travel website, you may create categories like United States, Australia and Russia that easily refer users to the post on your page relative to those topics.

In Jupiter, categories are available for the following post types: Posts, Employees, Faqs, News, Portfolios, Testimonials and Photo Albums. The process of configuring categories follows the same steps for all post types, therefore in this we’ll explain how to create categories using the type Posts as an example.


Adding a New Category

There are two ways to add a new category: from the categories page or the post’s new/edit page.

Adding a New Category from Categories Page

To add a new category from categories page:

1Go to the Categories page.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - categories page

2Fill out the forms with the necessary information.
3Click Add New Category.

Adding a New Category from the Post’s New/edit Page

To add a new category from post’s new/edit page:

1From the Posts page, add a new post or edit an existing post.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - add new page

2From the Categories box, click on the + Add New Category link.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - add new category

3Fill out the respective form with the necessary information and click on Add New Category.

Adding Child Categories

WordPress allows you to add parent and child categories. It’s massively helpful in organizing a site’s content.

To extend our first example, let’s say you have a travel website with worldwide destinations. You may want users to be able to find blog posts by country and city.

If you have posts about Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, you can add those cities as child categories under the United States parent category. That way, the user can view all the posts in the United States archive page and see each city post belonging to that category.

To add child categories, you’ll need to choose a parent category in step 2 when creating a new category page as explained before.

Adding an Image to a Category

When adding a category from the Categories page, there is a thumbnail setting which allows you to upload an image. This image is used as a background image when you use the Category Showcase shortcode.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - upload image


Editing a Category

To edit a category:

1Go to the Categories page.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - categories page

2Mouse over one of the categories in the list and click on Edit.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - Category edit link
3From the Edit Category page, update the information.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - Category edit page

4Click Update.

Removing a Category

To remove a category:

1Go to the Categories page.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - categories page

2Mouse over one of the categories in the list and click on Delete.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - Category delete link

3Click OK to delete the category permanently.

Assigning Categories to Posts

To assign categories to posts, you’ll need to use the Categories box in the new or edit post page.

1Go to the Posts page and click on one of the post titles.
2From the Categories box, check categories.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - assign categories

3Click Update.

Displaying Categories

There are two ways to display categories: the categories widget and the category showcase shortcode

Displaying Categories via Categories Widget

This is one of the default WordPress widgets that shows the category titles and post numbers as a list. This widget shows categories only from Posts.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - Categories widget

Displaying Categories via the Category Showcase Shortcode

This is one of the Jupiter’s shortcodes that allows you to display categories in a grid layout. You can only display categories from Posts, Portfolios, WooCommerce and News. To learn more about this shortcode, read the Category showcase shortcode article.


Displaying Posts by Categories

There are two main ways to view and display posts by categories: the archive page and shortcodes

Viewing Posts in the Archive Pages

Category archive pages list all the posts in each category. You can find each category archive page from the Categories page by clicking on the View link.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - Category view link

Displaying Posts by Categories with Shortcodes

In some of the shortcodes like Blog, Portfolio, and Testimonial, there is a settings called Select Specific Categories which allow you to specify categories.


Configuring the Category Archive URLs

For Posts and Portfolios category, it’s possible to configure the category base URL from the WordPress admin, but for the rest of the post types, you’ll need to use custom codes.

Configuring the Posts archive URL

The default base for Posts is “category”. To change it:

1From the WordPress left menu, go to the Settings > Permalinks page.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - permalinks page

2Add a text in the Category Base field.

Configuring Categories and Subcategories - category base

3Click Save Changes.

Configuring the Portfolios Archive URL

The default base for Portfolios is “portfolio_category”. To change it:

1Go to Theme Options > Portfolio > Portfolio Single Post page.
2Change the text in the Portfolio Category Slug field.
3Click Save Settings.

 


Configuring the Archive Page Design

It’s possible to configure the design of the blog posts and portfolio items archive pages. There are no design settings for the rest of the post types like testimonial, employees, etc.

To configure the design of the blog posts or portfolio items archive pages:

1Go to Theme Options > Blog/News > Archive or Theme Options > Portfolio > Archive
2For the Blog posts archive, the following settings are available.

Setting Description

Blog Archive Layout Sets the layout all the archive pages.
Archive Loop Style Sets the predefined design for items in the archive pages.
Archive Page Title Sets the page title in the archive pages.
Archive Page Subtitle Toggles the subtitle. The subtitle text comes from each category description.
Archive Loop Image Height Sets the image height.
Show Blog Meta? Toggles the meta information like author, category and date.
Pagination Style Sets the type of pagination.

3For the Portfolio items archive, the following settings are available.

Setting Description

Portfolio Archive Layout Sets the layout for all the archive pages.
Portfolio Style Sets the predefined design for items in the archive pages.
Columns Sets the number of columns for the items.
Featured Image Height Sets the image height.
Pagination Style Sets the type of pagination.

4Click Save Settings.

Did this answer your question?