Pro version users have the option to create and assign categories to announcements. This is quite similar to the standard categories used in posts, which allow your visitors to sort and filter announcements based on a set of criteria. If you have a lot of announcements, many timelines or just want to provide a simple way for your users to filter announcements assigning categories to them is the way to go.

You can create new categories in two different ways. The first way, is directly on the ‘Categories’ page. From the administrative dashboard, in the left hand menu hover over ‘Timeline Express‘ and select ‘Categories‘.

1) Name

You can enter the name of your category in the first field, titled ‘Name’. This is the name of the category that the user will see on the front end of your site.

2) Slug

The slug is the name of the category in the URL. For example, if my category name was ‘Important Information’ my slug could be ‘important-information’. Additionally the URL of my ‘Important Information’ category may be http://www.exmaple.com/timeline/important-information/, which would display the announcements categorized under ‘Important Information’.

3) Parent

The parent doesn’t really do much on the front end of the site, but is great for category management. It will visually nest your categories under their parents, so you have an easier time managing and assigning categories in future.

4) Description

Again, the description is solely for administrative purposes. It won’t be displayed on the front end of the site, but is useful for explaining or describing what each category is used for. If you create a category, you may forget what it’s purpose was 2 or 3 years down the line.

5) Category Management

If you need to edit, or delete an existing category you can do so by hovering over the announcement category in the right hand table. Upon hover, you’ll see a menu appear below the category name.

‘Edit‘ will bring you to an internal page where you can edit the selected category. All of the options will be the same as they are on the current page.

‘Quick Edit‘ is similar to edit, but allows you to edit a few things without directing away from the page.

‘Delete‘ does what it says, and deletes the category from your site. Any existing announcements with this category assigned to it, will no longer have the category assigned to it.

‘View‘ leads to an archive page of all timeline express categories. At this time, an archive page is not bundled with Timeline Express. You can create an archive page by defining a template archive-timeline_express_categories.php in your theme root. In future, we will bundle an archive page – listing out the announcements similar to a blog listing page.