I wonder why no one has ever tweaked php codes to display an expandable tree mechanism for displaying categories. I think categories should be displayed in the following format :
– Showing all top level categories all the time.
– showing all categories above current categories all the time
– showing all categories 1 level deep the current category
This will save ample bandwidth loading pages much faster…
Anybody working on this front ??
I don’t know about the coding, but 800 categories for a blog ? That’s just a little excessive isn’t it ?
Probably not. Not many of us have that many categories for starters. Secondly, to do that means reloading the page each time a cat is clicked. So if you wanted to go to a sub ca, you first have to click the parent cat (first you have to know where it is – a first time visitor may not) then click the sub cat. So much for the bandwidth arguement.
Also, there’s the issue of usability and accessability. When I come across a website for the first time, I look at what categories there are. I expect all available cats to be shown. If I can’t see the sub cats, I won’t know that there’s one that may interest me. All I see is the parent cat, and will assume that’s all there is.
But then again, it could be just me.
Tg
Hi TG,
Thanks for a nice insightful reply… TG, I’m planning a serious informative site using WP… I have around 40 main categories, each having around 20 sub categories, moreover, each of those sub categories contain around 10 sub sub categories… and then some of these sub sub categories also have their own sub categories! TG, in contrast to this specific scenario, I’m too concerned about the usability factor… and so I always want to show only the top 40 categories all the time….and if user chooses any particular subcateogry, the sub-category list below that category should open up.. We can show a pointer image with all those cateogies that have subcategories below them.. so that user can click those categories to open their sub categories… not always forced to show up ALL thousands of categories/subcategories/sub-sub-categories all the time! What you say?
I think this can be done… I’ve been trying hacking wp for this all the time… but I really don’t know php much… and so I seek help from the community over here! I hope I get help.. I think this should be an issue for 100s of others out there…
TG, let me tell you that if we show cats the way I’m talking, we actually end up creating a perfect SEO optimized internal link structure for our blog web site… and Google will be the first one to appreciate it…. cuz only relevant related categories are shown while checking out a particular category…. all deepest categories link to top categories where as topmost categories do not link back to deepest ones… each category will link to all cats below them + all top cats…. I hope you got it… I think we should heat up on this issue and someone among us should come up with a perfect hack for this! What you say?
I’ll be waiting to hear… I’m a SEO at the core… have played a lot with googlebot since ages… even before pagerank was born… I know what these bots want… I think I should have chosen the title for this post as “WORDPRESS SEO ” !
Waiting to be heart!
Woof! Ummmm….. I wonder if maybe WP isn’t going to be what you need in this case. Something that large might be better served by a true CMS (content management system) such as Xoops or PostNUKE.
TG