I’ve got a site with a bunch of categories and lots of subcategories sorted in alpha (I had the import script do that). We added a new subcat and needed to put it in the right place.
Then I noticed that there is a Reorder categories on /categories. “Aha!” thought I. But when I clicked it, it just put all of the categories in what appeared to be a random order (but I guess is probably latest?), and all of the subcategories were all together, not sorted under their categories as I expected.
I guess this is a really hard interface to get right.
And shouldn’t I be able to create a sub-category from the category under which I want to put it? It’s confusing to have to go to /categories to be able to create a subcategory. Perhaps that’s why I’m confused every time.
Sorry I am not following what you wrote, at all? Can you show it with a picture?
To be able to re-order you need to enable that in site settings, then the reorder button will show up on the /categories page. Sounds like you didn’t do that?
The default is dynamic order, that is, ordered by latest topic update in the category. We feel this is the best and most suitable default in most cases, so that the most active categories float to the top naturally.
Yeah, I think this is one of those =1000 words situations.
I’ve got a zillion categories and subcats (it’s about 750 categories total, with about 30 at the top level–just how stupid that may be is a for another topic).
See how all of those counties, which are sorted under the proper states all end up in one big list?
When I did the subcat sort I did them by 5s. My guess is that all of the ones in that image are the first county by alpha in the state.
What would be really nice is to be able to sort within a subcategory, but since there’s no category hamburger on a /c/category-slug page, that’s not an option.
Bump into this a lot of times for large category lists. When the number gets more than 30-40, it is really a hassle to manage. And the ui is very very easy to screw up (I think there are some subtle bugs).
I make it a practice of always putting a category into the right order as soon as it is created. Doing it in bulk afterwards is a lot of pain and risks. But of course @pfaffman is bulk loading an entire site so this won’t work for him.
At lesst being able to move a parent category as a single block wirh its children in the sorting will solve most of the usage prob.
Thus: Recorder a leaf category: Just move up/down. Doesn’t go out of parent boundary.
Recorder a parent category: The whole tree moves up/down preserving children order.
Why do we even show subcategories in that list? I don’t know of any place that shows categories like that. It should only show top level, and the scope to one parent to sort subcategories.
Subcategories of a particular parent category are only ever sorted relative to each other. So on the reorder categories dialog, you just need to make sure the relative order within a parent category is correct.
When I wrote the dialog, I didn’t scope per parent because it seemed like a lot of work for marginal gain in an admin-only dialog.
Hi, just to clarify if I have the same problem as OP @pfaffman or not …
I have a private category named Consultancy. Then I created a private sub-category “Customer 1” inside the “Consultancy”. As latest created, they are at the bottom. Because of they private, each customer sees only its own category.
When I reorder “Consultancy” putting it to the top of the list, I expect that the sub-category goes to the top too. But it stands at the bottom. May I have an option to auto-reorder sub-categories with the parent category in such cases? Because the reason of reordering is to provide customers to have their private categories at the first line when they compose new topics. Currently they find their category at the bottom (boring to scroll each time):
=1000 words situations.
