Categories

Hello, and welcome back to module 1 of the Basic CMS Training. This video is all about “Categories”. Categories are a way for you to group similar content together, and allow it to be used across your site. Categories can be used for a variety of content, like posts, events, people, and more.

An example of “Categories” being used is Web Services’ News page. All the news posts listed here are grouped under the “Carleton CMS Blog” category.

Now let’s try creating a category and applying it to a post. I am working with posts for this example, but the same steps apply for pages, FAQ, glossary, files, events, people and videos.

From the dashboard, hover over “Posts” on the side menu and click “Categories”. You’ll be brought to a new page, where you’ll be able to see all of the current “Post” categories that exist on your site.

The boxes on the left here allow you to create a new category. First, you need to give your category a name, which I’m just gonna call “Test News”.

Then, we’re gonna fill out the slug, which is just the ending of the URL. It can contain letters, numbers, and hyphens. Here, I’ll just type “test-news”.

You have the option to select a parent category for your new category, which would further group items together. An example of this would be making a category called “Spring Newsletter” with the parent being “Newsletter”. Having a parent category is not required.

Lastly, you can add a description for the category. This isn’t necessary with CMS, as the descriptions are not visible on the front end anywhere.

Once you’re done filling out the necessary fields, click the “Add New Category” button. Your new category will appear on the list on the left.

Now let’s add a post to this new category. One way you can do this is to open the content editor screen for a post, and navigate to the Categories menu. Check off all categories you wish to apply to the post, and click “Save Draft” or “Publish” to save your option.

You can also create a new Category from this menu by clicking “Add New Category”, typing the name in the “New Category Name” field, and clicking the “Add New Category” button at the bottom. This new category will be automatically applied to your post, but you can uncheck it.

Another way to add a post to a category is by using “Quick Edit”. From the list of posts, hover over the title of the post you want, and click “Quick Edit”. Check off the categories you want to apply to your post, and click “Update” to save your changes.

You will learn more about categories and how they are used to pull content onto a page in Basic Training Module 2: Types of Content and Advanced Training Module 3: Advanced Types of Content.