Recently one of my clients wanted his categories to display in the sidebar. And he wanted the posts to display under each category.

So, of course, I went to the WordPress Plugin Repository. A search for ‘categories’ yielded a mere 42 pages of results.

How did I choose?

I just started reading the descriptions. If you ever have some free time, browse around the Repository. What these plugin developers do is amazing.

There are category plugins that hide certain categories from certain user levels. Some exclude designated categories from designated pages. Plugins that translate the category names. Plugins that create a category cloud widget. A plugin to exclude specific categories from the home page.  Plugins that do things in code that I don’t understand.

And finally on page two, I found what I was looking for: Collapsing Categories.

This is a very simple plugin that uses Javascript to form a collapsible set of
links in the sidebar for the categories. Every post corresponding to a given
category will be expanded.

Perfect!

I always want to see the front end view before I spend a lot of time figuring out the rest of the plugin, so I took a quick trip to the widget section and dragged the ‘Collapsing Categories’ widget into place. It displayed flawlessly with the default settings. Take a look:

Note the little arrows pointing to each category name. See beside ‘Email Plugins’, the arrow points down instead. The titles of the three posts I’ve written and assigned to that category are displaying. Visitors can click the category of interest and navigate from the sidebar to any posts they want to read. Clicking the arrow again will collapse the posts, making it easier  to navigate.

Next week I will explain how to install and configure this plugin. It has the ability to customize the JavaScript, and the widget itself has an extensive profile for customization. We’ll see what this plugin is capable of. Talk with you then.

==========================

If you want to sign up to have my blog posts delivered to your inbox, click here.

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, please click the “tweet” button at the top of the post.

Or use the “Share This” tool to share using your favorite social network.

Need help with this plugin? Click here to go to my contact form.

Need a virtual event for your website? Contact me here: Deborah at MyWPWorks dot com.

{ 0 comments }