Now how about some real categories?

You've come this far - now, there's only one set of categories and containeris left to create. These ones are arguably the most important, as they alone are the ones that actually do the categorising of content. I say arguably, because the ones we've created so far exist purely for structure; and some people consider structure more important than categorisation, and vice versa. However, with the categoryi module, it doesn't matter whether you've got a structure fetish, or a categorisation fetish, or both: the module takes care of both these things. So you can have your cake and eat it, too.

We'll start with the topics container for news items. Go to the page for the news category, and click the add child container link. Enter topics as the title of your new container. Go down to the container information box, and in the help text field, enter something like "Select one or more topics for this news item". In the admin title field, enter topics (news), so that we can differentiate this container from the one for blog topics, which we are going to create further on. Under types, tick the story check box. Tick the multiple select check box.

Go down to the category display settings box. Tick the display TOC within this container check box, as well as the show links to categories on assigned nodeis, and show message if no posts check boxes. If you wish, you may also tick the show assigned node count in TOC check box - this will show the number of nodes assigned to each category in the TOC. Then, in the category menu items box, set the menu items within this container field to enabled, and leave menu items for assigned nodes set to disabled.

You may recall that in the two sections containers that we created, we set the menu items for assigned nodes option to enabled (but disable each item). However, in this container, we're setting it to disabled. Since every news item that we create will be in a category from both these containers (or, at the least, from the sections container), we have set it up in such a way that news items will always be placed under the generic news category, rather than under the various topic categories to which we are assigned.

This is a common and useful technique, and there is good reason to set it up in this way. You see, a menu item can only be placed in one spot in the site's tree. Furthermore, a breadcrumb can only reflect one parenti of a particular page. So what happens to content that gets assigned to more than one category? For example, news items may be tagged with more than one category from the topics container. It is ugly and doesn't make sense to place it under one of these topics, and not under any of the others. A much cleaner solution is to simply place it under the news category, where it is guaranteed to only ever have one parent, and to have a breadcrumb trail that can be properly parsed.

By disabling the menu items for assigned nodes setting here, we guarantee that the menu items for news nodes end up under the master news category.

Now, submit the topics container, and go to the page for your new container. Click the add child category link, and add a few categories that you might use to tag news items with (e.g. 'sport', 'entertainment', 'lifestyle'). If you go back to the topics page, you should see all these new categories listed there. You may also notice that when you add a new category, you're redirected straight back to the 'add category' page, rather than being taken to the node page for the new category. This is to make it more convenient to add many categories at once, and it's a feature borrowed from the taxonomy module and its 'add term' page.

Repeat this process for the child containers of blog, by going to the blog page, and clicking the add child container link there. Add the topics and moods containers, with the same settings that you used for the topics container in news (except that the admin title should be set to topics (blog) for the topics container, and should be blank for the moods container; and that you might want to tick the free tagging check box for moods, as the categories in this container are likely to be added on-the-fly). Once again, fill these two new containers with some dummy categories, by clicking the add child category link on the page for each container.

News items and blog entries can easily be browsed by various types of categories. Here, blog entries are being browsed by topic.

Mission (almost) accomplished: your category structure is in place! Now, there's just one step left before we can adjourn and have some tea.