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In a school WP site there used to be a main category "Blog" with n subcategories for each class:

Blog
|__ Year 1
|__ Year 2
.
. 
|__ Year 9

Now we want to introduce the "Announcement" category, however this category will have the same subcategories as "Blog"

Announcement
|__ Year 1
|__ Year 2
.
. 
|__ Year 9

No big troubles since WP will create different slugs for each subcategory, however I feel like wasting subcategories and making subcategory selection a bit confusing.

I wonder if it makes sense promoting the "Year x" subcategories to main category and couple the other main categories to properly address categorising.

For instance, a post with main categories "blog" & "Year 2" will be related to class year 2 in the blog, while a post with main categories "announcement" & "Year 5" will refer to an announcement for class Year 5.

What do you think?

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2 Answers 2

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What you could do is use a mixture of Categories and Tags if you prefer to prevent duplication of categories and confusion for the post authors.

Use the Years as categories and Blog/Announcement as tag. So, as example:

If they post a Blog for "Year 2", they post it in the category "Year 2" and use the tag "Blog". If they post an Announcement for "Year 5", they post it in the category "Year 5" and use the tag Announcement

In your menu structure you can use a individual link / custom link with the following structure:

/%category%/?tag=%tag%

Examples:

Blog:     /?tag=blog
-Year 1:  /year-1/?tag=blog
-Year 2:  /year-2/?tag=blog
-Year 3:  /year-3/?tag=blog
...

and

Announcements: /?tag=announcement
-Year 1:       /year-1/?tag=announcement
-Year 2:       /year-2/?tag=announcement
-Year 3:       /year-3/?tag=announcement
...

Surely it depends on your permalink structure, so it could be like:

-Year 1:       /categorie/year-1/?tag=announcement

or

-Year 2:       /cat/year-2/?tag=announcement

or whatever your structure is.

------------------------------------------------------------

Otherwise you can create for every category-mix like Blog & Year 1, Blog & Year 2, Announcement & Year 1, Announcement & Year 2 ... a custom template file with a query calling these two categories loading into a page so you can set the page as your menu item.

Read more about queries here:

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    I see that users are a bit confused about using tags and most-of-all they may use tags misspelling and creating wrong ones. Although your idea of creating a mix of categories and tags seems better from an architectural point of view, I am afraid it can lead into troubles for the users. Maybe I would prefer using mixed categories although I have to plan in advance theme-related potential problems, for instance dealing with category pages... what happens when a user will click on a class category? All posts related to that category (blog or announcement) will mix together?
    – Riccardo
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 14:22
  • Yes, they would be all mixed together if you use the Class/Year as main Category. This would be actually not a problem, as example, if my kid goes to Class 4 I wouldn't mind to have a overview of all actual informations being posted regarding that class and still can filter it through sub-categories (Blog/Announcements). You could implant a sub-menu into each individual template for the users to filter Blogs and Announcements.
    – marvinpoo
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 14:30
  • In this case I could develop custom category pages to list posts not just from one but from two categories, for example blog+class or announcement+class. This should help filtering a bit contents. So the site could have: category-announcement list (announcements for all classes), category-blog list (blogs from all classes) or announcement+class/blog+class to filter contents for a specific class. Of course this would not prevent users from clicking on a category-class forwarding them to an overview as you wrote. Seems to be acceptable?
    – Riccardo
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 14:43
  • Seems very reasonable and acceptable. Might be the best way if you don't want the post creators to get confused by tags.
    – marvinpoo
    Commented Sep 6, 2016 at 14:46
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I'm creating my first blog and have the same issue: 3 categories (history culture and politics) with the same subcategories (different European countries A, B, C...). How can I organise my menu items? Would it be appropriate to have it like this:

Countries:

-B

. . . And then a hover over each country shows the three categories:

A: -History -Culture -Politics

B: -History -Culture -Politics

C: . . .

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