Changing category order in category menu bar, not in sidebar cat. list
 

So far, I have not found a way to re-order the categories in the category menu bar. It's possible in the sidebars, but I don't even care about having the categories there. I have too much other content there already.

Has anyone found a way to do this? It seems that WP keeps the categories in the order in which they were first created. I want them in order of importance and/or popularity, decided by me, not the system.

Wow! Ouch! I thought I'd have an easy answer for you; expecting that categories in their menu bar would be treated just the same as pages are in their's. On the Page Menu Bar you can set the sort to key on an arbritary "order no." that you set (and can later RE-set if needs be) for each page.

Apparently, with ordering the categories you're stuck with either order of creation, alphabetic by name or by the "number of posts." That last choice is "close" to your "importance and/or popularity", but you don't determine the ratings and they might fluctuate over time. Sort of disconcerting for your users to have navigation elements moving around periodically.

Right. I think it's weird that you can't treat the cats the same as pages in the menu bars. Various plugins let you re-order the lists in the sidebars, but they don't work for the menu bars.

I'm sure there must be a way!

You could install this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-category-order/

and to the bottom of Atahualpa's functions.php add, without causing blank lines or spaces

Wow, Flynn. I did exactly as you said, and my site was disabled. First I got a blank white screen while in admin, then when I clicked on my bookmark for the front page, I got just a bit of the top blue header, and nothing. Just the spinning rainbow. I couldn't even get back into admin to edit functions.php, so I did it via FTP. Whew.

I wish somebody would create a plugin that would do what I want.

Or can you build this into the next version of the theme? It should be possible to order the cat and page menu bars as desired.

Sorry for that, Paula. The plugin mentioned to add the "order" option to wp_list_categories even though I did not try it out.

I'd like to get my to-do list shorter before I add new things.

OK, I added your code again, and this time put it in the right place. You said "at the bottom," but you didn't mean all the way at the bottom. :o

I reactivated the plugin and tried to change the order. Nothing changed.

The plugin seems to want to work only in sidebars.

EDIT: Woops. This time, adding the code didn't break the whole site, but when I went to theme options, nothing worked there. It's OK now, but I'm not messing with this again.

It is now May 10, 2010 more than a year later I am having similiar problems trying to use the plugin "category order". I downloaded category order, attempted to change the order and nothing happens when I return to the Web Page? I would like to limit the number of categories on Bar2 (Atahualpa 3.4.6) WP 2.9.1

I tried the ATO count option and it doesn't seem to limit the number of bar2 categories.

Has anything changed within the past year. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Alfie

Try switching to the default theme and see if it works or not. If it still doen't work, contact the plugin author

I'd like to add that in Wordpress 3.0, which I'm beta-testing, you'll have much more control over menus. I hope Flynn will include native support in Atahualpa for the new custom menu function, so it will work in the menu bars as well as in the sidebar. Right now, you have to use the sidebar menu widget.

Ah HA! I had a feeling that the "coming-soon" WP 3.0's menu changes might not play well with ATA's menu bar.

Now, if one updates to WP 3.0 when the time comes, BUT does not "activate" any of the new WP "Woo Menu" functions, will all be okay? Or, will the current ATA menu bar crash under WP 3.0 and we should wait for Flynn to adjust ATA before trying 3.0?

Jim

Is it possible to edit the category IDs in the MySQL database and control their ordering in the %cat menu bar that way? Or does it totally mess up the posts? Has anyone tried this? Control of the category menu would be #1 on my wish list.

YES and NO - is it possible, certainly but you better be very careful and know what you are doing because there are three tables involved. If you really want to do it, then dig into the explanations at WordPress.org and make sure to have a database backup before you start.

Thank you! I may try it some day when I'm feeling brave. Three tables is a lot to juggle.

I donated several days ago, but it hasn't bee reflected in my profile yet. Is that just a matter of someone checking the emails from paypal?