I Started to reorder Categories, but I discovered that the old drag and drop feature as disappeared.
Now Ordering categories is extremely difficult and not frendly at all.
How I’m supposed to do?
AI-generated summary
Users discuss the challenges of reordering categories on a Discourse forum after the removal of the drag-and-drop feature. Passante expresses frustration with the current method, while Steven suggests using the “position” setting in admin settings. Riking explains that the drag-and-drop was removed due to bugs and that a new reorder dialog is in development. Fefrei provides a workaround using the fixed category positions setting, noting that the numbers behave sequentially and may change unexpectedly. John_mardlin questions how subcategories are ordered and finds the interface unintuitive, suggesting a clearer hierarchy like 1.1, 1.2, etc. Riking clarifies that the position setting affects category ordering and advises waiting for an upcoming update. Sam notes that the reorder button only appears when the setting is enabled, and Frold suggests making it a default for better usability.
You can change the “position” in the settings
It’s more mobile friendly in that way
I don’t agree…
This is like going back to ten years ordering way ![]()
The drag&drop was removed because it was broken and would often screw up other stuff along with it, and because you had to drag them an insane distance. A new dialog for just ordering the categories is in the works, but it’s not ready yet.
Has this dialogue been implemented yet? I found an admin setting called fixed category positions under Basic Setup, but it doesn’t appear to do anything.
After enabling this setting, edit your categories and enter a position under their settings tab.
These numbers behave a bit weird, but with a bit of experimentation you can order the categories as you want. I highly recommend having /categories in a separate tab and refreshing after every change to see what’s going on.
Thank you, @fefrei! I may never have discovered that on my own. Not exactly an intuitive interface. ![]()
To expand on the “weird” part: These numbers may change on their own. They appear to always be sequential, you can’t set them to arbitrary numbers (I wanted to use 100, 200, 210 for a subcategory etc.), you always have to look at the current state to choose the appropriate number to choose. Either that, or I was hallucinating when I did it on my install ![]()
I’d really love to see that feature improve ![]()
I’ll be fixing this up Monday ![]()
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The position will be used to order these:
Also, if you scroll down, you should see that it’s not alphabetical.
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You should wait to use the dialog until you get Category reordering fixes by riking · Pull Request #3748 · discourse/discourse · GitHub deployed
OK… but what is the risk if I were to do so? ![]()
To order which? There is no clear relationship between the numbering pattern in the “Reorder Categories” modal, and the actual presentation of our categories.
Is it that the distinction between categories and subcategories is not represented here, and categories are just ordered from low to high position wherever the admin has chosen to place them? Now that I look at it, that appears to be the case. Knowing that “Coinbase Developers” is a top-level category, then looking at it’s subcategories, I can see that they appear in order as numbered.
Without having insight into the architecture behind this scheme, this UI doesn’t feel intuitive to me. It would seem more natural to have top level categories be integers, and their subcategories as decimals, ie.
- Coinbase support
1.1 Mobile Apps
1.2 Buys and Sells
1.3 Bitcoin transactions
… - Coinbase Developers
2.1 Developer announcements
…
But short of that, some in app guidance (or a link to a post here), about the numbering scheme would be helpful.
You have to enable fixed category positions in site settings
Maybe it should be a default setting… Not that intuitive that this is a setting away from categories controlling, I think…


