Explore Categories and Tags

Welcome back to WordPress

So far, we've learned how to create and edit posts. In this video, we'll talk about how to organize your posts using categories and tags making it easier for your readers to find the content they're looking for. Before we dig in, it might be helpful to understand what tags and categories are and how they differ. To better understand this, let's take a look at our example site. Each blog post that you create in WordPress is filed under one or more categories. Categories allow you to organize your posts into topics, or groups of related articles so that your visitors can quickly find all the articles within that category or topic. Our demo site is currently using the default WordPress theme called 2017, and in this theme, the categories and tags for each post are displayed just below the post content.

Clicking a category link will open an archive page containing all the posts belonging to that category. The Posts Categories sub-panel is where you add, edit, or delete categories. And as we saw in an earlier video, categories may also be added when a post is being created.To create a new category, simply enter the Name of the category.

Next, you can either enter a Slug, which is the URL or web address for this category, or leave it blank and WordPress will automatically create one for you. Enter a Description if you like, and then click the Add New Category button. Each category may also be assigned to a category parent. This enables you to set up a hierarchy within your category structure. Using our Products category as an example, a sub-category might be rocket-powered products. So let's create a new category called Rocket-Powered. And we'll let WordPress automatically create the Slug, or the URL, for this category. I'll select Products as the category's parent. This means that any post that we create in this category will also be assigned to the Products category enabling folks to find that article in both the Products category and also our new Rocket-Powered category. The Bulk Action menu allows you to delete multiple categories at once.

And like the other panels in WordPress, the Quick Edit function allows us to quickly make changes to a category's Name or Permalink Slug directly from this pane.

In addition to being sorted by category, each post you create in WordPress can also be assigned one or more keywords, or terms which we call tags. Tags are like a one or two-word summary of your article. Or if you think of your site like a book, categories are like the table of contents, and tags are like the terms in the index. These tags enable your visitors to quickly access all the posts in your site containing the same tag or keyword. For example, this post has been assigned two tags, rockets and skates. A visitor to our site can click one of these tags and an archive page with all the posts containing that tag will be displayed. While we're on any tag archive page, we can also quickly edit the tag from the toolbar, but you can also edit tags form the Tags sub-panel. Just like categories, tags can be manually created, edited, or deleted in bulk. And because you'll likely end up with dozens of tags used throughout your site, the search option allows you to find a specific tag to edit or delete.Now you know how to sort and organize your posts using categories and tags making it easier for your visitors to find related content, in our next video we'll learn how to add and edit pages.