Different category and sub-category order behaviour

Product Support

AI-generated summary

In a discussion titled “Different category and sub-category order behaviour,” Tom_Newhouse asks if it’s possible to sort sub-categories (e.g., in “Rolling stock products”) by latest activity while preserving the main category order — particularly since their site uses /categories as the homepage and may have hundreds of sub-categories. He includes a screenshot illustrating the layout. Falco initially cautions against using so many categories, linking to a meta post on recommended limits. Tom_Newhouse clarifies that their usage is within Sam’s stated limits and reiterates the request for a solution. Falco replies that achieving this behavior requires a custom theme-component, and links to the Developer’s guide to Discourse Themes. No out-of-the-box solution is offered, but the path forward is pointed to theme development.

1

I’m currently trying to figure out if there is any way to have categories and sub-categories behave differently in terms of sort order.

We’re using /categories as our home page and due to the nature of our products, certain categories are likely to have hundreds of sub-categories.

I’ve managed to limit the number of sub-categories shown on the main category page using CSS but I’d like for these sub-categories in the “Rolling stock products” category (say Top 5 or 10) to be ordered by latest activity whilst keeping the higher level category order intact.

categoryorder
categoryorder503×749 54.7 KB

Is this possible?

Thanks in advance for any help.

2

We don’t recommend using that number of categories.

3

It’s well within the limits that Sam mentioned in his post.

Is there an actual solution to the question at hand though?

4

You will need a custom theme-component to get that behavior.

Developer’s guide to Discourse Themes