Organising articles into categories

A category is the box an article lives in. It decides which overview page the article appears on, and it gives that group of articles its own feed address. If you publish more than one kind of thing (news and case studies, say) categories are how you keep them apart.

Every article belongs to exactly one category, chosen when you create it, and it can't be moved afterwards. The create dialog takes the category from wherever you're standing when you press Add publication, and the edit dialog has no category field. Plan your categories before you start writing.

If you're setting up a blog for the first time, start with Setting up a blog.

Creating one

New category, top right. Two fields:

A category belongs to one language. On a bilingual site, News and Nieuws are two separate categories with their own articles. Writing an article once does not make it appear in both. The overview list shows each category with a flag so you can tell them apart.

There's no way to change a category's language afterwards. If you pick the wrong one, make a new category and recreate the articles.

Renaming and deleting

Both live behind the ⋮ menu on the category's row.

Edit category changes the name. It's safe for the articles inside, but:

Renaming a category changes its feed address. The address is built from the name, so Company news is /feed/company-news and renaming it to News makes it /feed/news. The old address stops working and anyone subscribed to it stops receiving articles, with no error to tell them. See RSS feeds for your articles.

Delete category removes the category from your lists. The articles in it are not deleted, which has two consequences:

• An overview element pointed at that category renders nothing at all. The page keeps its layout and loses its list.
• An overview element set to All categories, and the all-articles feed, keep showing those articles. They're still live articles; they just no longer have a visible category.

So if the point of deleting was to take the content down, deactivate or delete the articles first, then the category.

Different categories on different pages

Each overview page is a Publication category element with Source type set to Single category and one category chosen:

All three can share one article page. The Article page property on the overview element says which page opens when a visitor clicks an item, and that page holds a Publication container. One article page is usually enough for a whole site; point every overview at it.

A few combinations:

• A category with no overview element anywhere is invisible to visitors, however many articles it holds. Its feed still works.
• Two overview elements on the same page, pointing at two categories, is how you get "Latest news" and "Latest cases" side by side on a home page. Set Max number of items low on both.
• The same category twice with different offsets gives you a featured item above a list. Offset 0 with one item, then offset 1 with the rest.

How many categories?

Fewer than you'd think.

• One is right for most sites. A single News or Blog category, one overview page, one article page.
• Two or three when the kinds of content genuinely differ, and differ to the visitor, not to you. News and vacancies are different. "News 2025" and "News 2026" are not; that's what the date on the article is for.
• Not as tags. A category isn't a label you can apply to an article alongside others. An article has exactly one, permanently. If you want to group articles by subject as well as by kind, that isn't something categories can do.

Remember that on a bilingual site every category you add is really two.

Common issues