Assigning entries to categories
Imagine you have a hundred folders of documents and you need to file them away neatly in cabinets. Are you going to just dump them in no particular order? What happens when you need to find one particular folder later on? How will you search for it in that heap?
The solution, of course, is to organize the folders so that you will know exactly where you can retrieve them in the future. In Wordpress, your entries are organized automatically by date of posting. The one most commonly used is the monthly archive. But there is an even better way of organizing your entries. You can assign them to one or more categories.
But before you can assign your entries to categories, you have to create the categories first.
Click “Manage” in the main menu. When the “Manage” page opens, click “Categories” in the sub-menu.
Click the “Add New” link.
Type the category name that you want (keep it short and descriptive!) then hit the “Add Category” button.
Now, what’s that “Category parent” part? Let’s say you have a recipes blog and you have created the following categories: Chinese recipes, Filipino recipes and Japanese recipes. Now you want to subdivide “Filipino recipes” into meat, chicken, rice, fish and vegetables. You add each category and, in the “Category parent” drop-down menu, you choose “Filipino recipes.” That way, meat, chicken, rice, fish and vegetables become sub-categories of “Filipino recipes.”
Do you need to type in a description of every category that you create? Ideally, yes. The descriptions appear in the individual categories pages of your blog. Note though that some Wordpress themes do not include category description. You might type in a description for every category you create and not see them appear on your web pages.
Now, let’s say you are already composing your entry. It’s too much hustle to leave the “Write” page or to open a new browser window or tab to go to the categories page. Okay, on the right side of your “Write” page, you see the “Categories” box.
Type in your new category on the box highlighted by the red check mark then hit the “Add” button. The only problem with creating categories on the “Write” page is that you cannot create a sub-category. What you can do is to create the category then edit it later by assigning it to a parent category.