The WordPress category system does a great job for most people, however if you have over 1200 categories like Dave Powers’ New Music Nation web site, the standard admin screens for WordPress categories just aren’t going to cut it for you.
Dave got in touch with me and explained the problems he was having. They had addressed the front-end issues, but the volume of categories he had were causing the category administration pages to fail to load.
Project Goals
Create an alternate interface for managing categories in the WordPress administration screens – one that can handle a as many categories as you can throw at it.
Timeline
Dave first contacted me in mid-November 2006. We discussed the project via e-mail, and signed off several days later to begin development at the end of November. I actually was able to begin the project a little earlier than expected, and delivered the completed project at the end of November.
Deliverables
An alternate administrative interface for managing WordPress categories.
Process
Dave contacted me and we discussed the project via e-mail. He basically told me what his end goal was, and left it up to me to implement in the manner I thought best.
I investigated the way the existing category admin worked on the back end and identified the areas where a large nested category list would cause problems. Then I designed changes to relieve these specific issues.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to use existing hooks to make the necessary changes so I implemented my changes altering as little core code as possible.
The basic change was to show only one level of categories at a time, and no more than 50 categories in the list – paging the list where needed. This needed to be done in both the list of categories and also for the “parent category” drop down list category in the category add/edit form.
End Result
I mailed the modifications as replacement and additional files, along with installation instructions to Dave while he was on vacation.
Dave returned from vacation and contacted me a few days later. He explained that he didn’t have experience uploading files like this (even with the instructions) so we expanded the project for me to also do the installation and configuration of the new admin screens on his server.
Once I had everything working as needed for Dave, I decided to see if I could add a few hooks to WordPress to allow my modifications to work as a pure plugin (without requiring modification of any WordPress core files).
I identified the places where I could add a few simple hooks and created a patch accordingly. This patch was accepted and included in WordPress 2.1.
With Dave’s blessing, I’ll be packaging this functionality up as a plugin for WordPress 2.1.
Credits and Disclaimers
Thanks to Dave Powers for having a great attitude towards Open Source and allowing (encouraging actually) the work done for him to be published so that others could benefit as well.
Thanks to Ryan Boren for reviewing and accepting the WordPress patch required to allow this to work as a pure plugin.
Oh my, I *so* would love this plugin.
That’s so cool that Dave Powers is willing to let this one-off project you created become a plugin for the mass amounts of WordPress users who also have a ton of categories.
What’s your timeline on having this released into the wild?
Go, Alex!
C’mon, this is Alex — someone whose “intimate” knowlege of the code has allowed him to do more things than most. He’s also been extremely helpful, and extremely accessible.
That’s who the Kudos should go to.
But, hey, thanks, Dave, for bringing it up. 😉
Cheers to Open Source! And, thanks for contributing the mass. 😉
Great to hear. I’ve got a project with a similar amount of categories in development and had no idea how WP was going to manage it. Thanks again for all your development for WordPress.
Well, not, the categories feature has NOT done a great job for everybody. At least, with WP 2.1, we see words rather than having to remember a number. But, as yet, developers still seem to have trouble distinguishing the difference between AND versus OR.
I frequently use Ultimate Tag Warrior to find posts that are tagged with one tag AND another tag, whereas a search for cat=onenumber + cat=anothernumber yields too many results and is unhelpful.
[…] Overload provides an alternate administrative interface for managing categories in WordPress. This was developed for Dave Powers’ New Music Nation web site, who had over 1200 (nested) categories and the […]
Great Plugin! I hope I can implement this on my blog too.
Great plugin. Any thought to getting functionality on the write panel? It takes me forever to find the different categories and subcategories in this list.
If you’d like to have me add that as a project for you I’d love to do it.