Start Transcript – Organizing Posts in WordPress with Categories:

Hey, everybody. It’s Roger Williams with Roger Williams Media. Just doing a quick screencast today about WordPress and categories. This is a test site I’m doing this on, Rolling With Grass. My wife and I are currently traveling around the country and this blog basically follows our journeys.

If we come here into the ever familiar dashboard we’ve got our posts. My recommendation is that you sit down and you write 20 to 30 posts before you even start thinking about categories. Why? Until you start writing your posts you’re not going to really have a good idea of what you want to write about. Write about it first. Figure out what you want to write about and then sit back and take a high level overview of the different categories that your writing fits into.

When we come in here and we look at the categories for this site you can tell that I did not do that. Learn from me in what not to do. As you can see, I’ve got a ton of categories here, way too many. More importantly, you can see I’ve got categories with one post. I’ve got some categories … none with zero but I’ve got a bunch of categories with just one post. That’s not very effective.

My recommendation to you is write first, then come back and figure out what categories you want. As you can see, we’ve got campgrounds, we’ve got 16 posts in campgrounds, so I like writing about that a lot. I’ve got on the road. Turns out we’re on the road so that’s a good category to fill stuff into. We’ve got equipment. I’ve got three posts in there, so I can get more going.

Today I’m just going to create a very simple category called test just to show you what you’ve got going on. You’ve got the name of it, you’ve got the slug. If you want it to be a child to a parent category you can do that here. Then if you want to add a description you put that here. I’ll show you how that can work for you later on. We add the category, we see that it’s right here, and then now if we want to add posts to it we can come in here to all posts and there’s two ways of adding a post to a category.

The first one is we click into the actual post, we scroll down the right side, click on the category we want to ad it to, hit update, and it’s updated that post. The alternate way is we go back to this all post page, and as you mouse over the posts you’ll see that there is edit and quick edit. If we come here and we click on quick edit it just keeps us on the same page. We add it to that category, we hit update, we can scroll down here really quick, bam, and we can update a bunch of posts very quickly with that.

Now, as we go to the website we can make an update where we come in here to the menu and we can choose categories. Scroll down, there’s the category that we just added. We want to add this to the menu. For this theme this is how this is going to work. Your theme might be a little different. We can drag this around, put it where we want it to be. Let’s have it just under others who wonder. Hit save menu, hit visit site, and boom, there’s our new category and there’s the description of the category. That’s where the description of the category comes in handy. When you’re showing it in the menu on this them for instance, the description shows up right there, tells you what that category’s about. When you click on the category it actually has an archive of all the posts that are in that category.

There you go. There’s adding a category to a WordPress and there’s adding posts to your category, and there’s adding your category to the menu for your theme. Very simple, very easy to use. If you have any questions please let me know. If there’s anything else you’d like to learn about WordPress, let me know what videos you want me to make. I’ll make the video for you. Hope you enjoyed it. We’ll talk to you soon.
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