How to create a navigation based on categories in WordPress

Having a category based navigation will allow you to publish posts both on the homepage and a dedicated category navigation node. This way you can  make the post appear on multiple categories/navigations across your site.

For example, I would like to place this post on “How to create a navigation based on categories in WordPress”  both on my home page and under the category WordPress which is under the parent category Shark Bait.

So to put it in simple words, our navigation will be driven by categories and not pages.

In this short post I will show you how to add the category to the navigation and assign a post to the new created category .

The end result will allow me to publish this post in two different places on my site, the post  will be published both on the home page as a new post and under the desired category Shark Bait – > WordPress

High level steps :

1. Create a new category.
2. Set the navigation.
3. Assign a new post to the new category.

 Create New Category

1. Log into your WordPress account and select WD Admin on the lower corner of your left navigation.
2. Select Posts – > Categories,  name the category and provide description, leave the parent selection on None.
3. In my blog I also want to create a child category, so I will create a new Category following step one only in this child category I will indicate which category is the parent in the “Parent”  Selection drop-down box.
4. The end result should be a parent and child categories.

Set the navigation

the new category is not part of the navigation yet, to add the category to the navigation follow these steps :

1. On the left rail navigation select Appearance ( brash icon ) and then select menus.
2. Check your new categories on the left  ( make sure you picked the Categories option under Custom Links first to view the categories options)
3. Add the categories that you have checked in step 3-4 by clicking on the Add to Menu button.
4. When you add the categories to the menu they don’t appear to maintain the same relationship, meaning that the WordPress category is not under the parent Shark Bait in my example. In order to correct this you will need click on the link Under “your parent category”.
5. Now you should see that the child category is indented under the parent category.
6. last step is to save the menu.

Assign a new post to the new category

In order to assign a new post to a category select the category under the post settings.

1. On the post left navigation select Categories & Tags.
2. Select the category for the new post.

 

Done

Your post now should be available from the homepage which is your site landing page and from the category or categories on the navigation.