Exercise: Creating a category using the “Categories” screen

You already know how to create categories using the post editor screen.

But in this exercise, I want you to use the “Categories” screen to create a new category.

So, go to the “Categories” screen.

If you notice, there is a “Add New Category” form on the left-hand side of the screen.

To create a category:

1) First, provide the name of the category

Make sure that the name is human-readable and meaningful.

Also, make sure you’re not creating a duplicate category.

Creating duplicates is an easy mistake, especially if you have a lot of categories. So, just double-check!

2) Next comes the “Slug” field.

We discussed the purpose of a category’s slug during the last lesson.  

The value you enter inside the “Slug” field will be used inside the archive page’s URL.

Having said that, you can ignore filling the “Slug” field because WordPress automatically generates a URL-Friendly slug based on the category’s name.

For example, if you have provided “Accounting” as the name, the automatically generated slug will be “accounting”:

https://criyasoft.com/category/accounting

Now because WordPress is generating the category slug automatically for us, in most cases, we don’t need to type the slug manually.

That’s why I didn’t fill the slug in the above screenshot.

But for some reason, if you are unhappy with the automatically generated slug, feel free to take control and type your own slug.

Just ensure not to include any special characters invalid for a browser URL.

3) The “Parent Category” field

This field is only necessary if you’re creating a child category.

If that is the case, remove “None” by selecting a parent category from the dropdown.

But for this exercise, we are creating a parent-level category, so leave the “Parent Category” field as is.

4) The “Description” field

Although it is optional,  I recommend adding a category description because it tells your visitors what the category is about.

Regarding the output, depending on the theme, WordPress automatically displays this category description on the archive page.

5) Finally, click the “Add New Category” button to create the category.

After creating the category, you should be able to find it inside the post editor screen, and you can assign it to any blog post you want.

That’s all.

That’s how easy it is to create a category using the “Categories” screen.

In the next lesson, we will learn how to rename a category.