How to totally get rid of Category in my blog?

Question

I prefer using tags and have no interest in using the categories. All my posts now are labeled with a category named "Uncategorized" and I want to turn them off! I want no more categories at all. How can I do that? Please help!

[Edit]

I'm using wordpress.com, not wordpress.org

Answer 1

There is no way at all to remove the uncategorized category from a wordpress.com webblog. It's not even possible with a self hosted wordpress w/o extensively hack the theme and the core.

The uncategorized category is a placeholder for a post not having any category. You can't even delete that category to not have any categories.

So sorry but the answer is no, there is no way to remove categories. Not on wordpress.com and only with a lot of changing the overall design of wordpress on a own copy.

Answer 2

You can't disable categories altogether, but you can prevent WP from displaying them:

• in the post editor screen within the admin interface, use screen options to hide the category picker.

• in your theme, remove category-related lines.

This won't, technically, disable everything category-related from showing (WP may still output, say, category RSS feeds and the like in HTML meta, and these will still work), but most of your authors and end users won't notice them.

Answer 3

Denis is right, there's no way to actually remove categories as a taxonomy from the 'post' post-type. If you're the only user, just use screen options to remove the categories meta box. If you want to remove it for all users, or you're trying to package a theme without categories, use this function:

add_action( 'add_meta_boxes', 'hide_categories_metabox' );

function hide_categories_metabox() {
    remove_meta_box('categorydiv','post','side');
}

If you really need to remove the functionality of categories altogether, hide the 'post' post type and register your own without support for categories. Just be aware that you won't be able to use WP's built-in archive functionality, at least until 3.1...?

Answer 4

I know I'm late to the party and maybe there is a way to completely get rid of the categories, but this is how I did it.

function modify_default_category() {
    $category_args = get_taxonomy( 'category' ); // returns an object of the category args
    // now re-register the taxonomy
    register_taxonomy( 'category', '', (array) $category_args ); //!the post type '' is not existing, so the category will not be shown at all
}
// hook it up to 11 so that it overrides the original register_taxonomy function
add_action( 'init', 'modify_default_category', 11 );

Alltough this does not really "remove" the categories, at least they will not be available for the default "post" post type. So no hiding metaboxes, admin columns and menu entries.