Assigning a page to a category allows nice landing pages to be created with listings of all articles in that category. This is good for pages that you want to have a wider readership than just people interested in a particular race.
Examples of category usage:
- Arpan’s Seven Step Marathon Programme: in English (US site) and Bulgarian
- US: Latest news
- Iceland: Latest news – English and Icelandic
Articles and categories
There are already some pre-existing categories (see below) that apply to all country sites. You also have the option to create your own that is just for your country site. All your categories are accessible via the Categories link in the top grey bar.
On the ‘Categories’ admin page, the pre-existing categories are marked ‘All sites’. These categories (e.g. Latest News, Race Stories, Training Tips) exist on all sites to use, and it will allow us bring together content in these categories from all over the world. For that reason, we would ask that only English content be marked with these categories. If you want to have ‘latest news’ in your own language, then the better option would be to create a separate category.
For example: Iceland has news in both English and Icelandic, and the site uses the ‘All sites’ Latest News category to categorise the English content (which then can appear on the global site and other sites), and creates its own site-specific category (Frettir) for Icleandic news items.
Adding and editing categories
- You can add a category that will be specific to your country site using the Add category link. It is worth putting a little bit of thought into what categories to use, and what kind of landing pages you would want visitors to see. Thinking about how to organise the existing content on the site will help you decide what categories to use.
On the ‘edit’ page for each individual category, you can customise quite a few things about how pages are presented in each category. You are able to edit all categories, even the pre-existing ‘All sites’ categories (in this case, the changes you make there will apply just to your country site).
- Image and description – these will appear on left hand side of category page. It is good if description is less than 100 words, and image should be landscape.
- Manually set order of articles on category page: you can decide if you want to manually set order in which content appears, or just let the latest content appear first. If you select this, a button called ‘Order category nodes’ appears in the top of the site, and you can use this to change the order via drag-and-drop.
When should you use it? Some categories like Latest News lend themselves to automatic sorting by date, whereas for others e.g. (Arpan’s Seven Steps) the content comes in a definite sequence, and it is important to manually set the order. Manually setting the order can also be good if you want featured content to appear first. The downside is that you need to check the order each time you add an article (new articles automatically appear at the top) - Give each article their own page: If this is turned off, then all links to articles will just direct to the articles’s ‘position’ in the category page, rather than the page itself. In general this should be left on – however, some categories work better with it turned off. For example (using the Arpan’s Seven Steps example again) this content is best viewed from the category page so you can see all the pages one after another.
In general, it is good for manually-ordered categories with not so many articles.You should leave it on if there are more than 20 articles assigned to the category, or if there is new content being constantly added to the category. - Display content initially in teaser form. This is good for categories where you would like people to quickly browse through articles – e.g. latest news. In teaser form, the first few lines show, but then the content fades out and there is a ‘more’ button. Clicking on the more button displays the rest of that article.
Note that on individual article pages, the ‘More articles in category’ content underneath the main article will automatically load in teaser form. - Add date and author: If checked, date and author information will be displayed for articles in this category.
- Type of navigation: Some categories with not so many items don’t need search, instead they can use a select menu to navigate between items. This is especially useful if articles don’t have their own page.
- Associate category with event: If selected, a prominent button is created that leads back to that event.