Categories
- Johannes Laatu (Deactivated)
- Madzy Soetman
Categories are a level of organisation above spaces on your site. In other words, categories act as containers for your spaces.
For example, common categories on an intranet include teams, projects, departments, sets of instructions, and stages of production. Spaces inside a teams category could be sales and marketing, product, internal IT, and test and support.
You can even organise categories further into subcategories.
Category menus and homes
By organising spaces into categories, you create two important navigation tools on your site: the category menu and category homes.
The category menu is located at the top of all the site’s pages. This menu shows all the categories you added to the site. When users click the category, they go to the category home. When they click the category’s down arrow, they see a dropdown list with links to all the spaces within the category.
Each category in your category menu can have a category home: a page with a layout that contains content, links and other types of content which you add using modules. Think of the category home as a landing page for the category.
Create and organise categories
You can create and organise categories in the Site Builder. To add a category to a site, simply click the Add Category button and choose a category type.
Category type | Description | Available since version |
|---|---|---|
Category Module | Can contain links, spaces, blogs and sub-categories. Each category gets its own Category home. | 6.0 |
Blog Module | Display blogs & news from your entire instance, the blog site, or specific spaces. | 6.0 |
HTML Module | Add a column containing custom HTML. This is useful if you want to insert widgets, for example. Refined does not offer support for issues caused by custom HTML. | 6.0 |
The spaces and blogs that are not organised into a category or the blog portal are listed as Uncategorised in the right-hand side of the Site Builder.
Tips to organise categories:
Drag and drop items to change their order. You can drag and drop items within sites, between sites, and between sites and the uncategorised list.
Use the search bar to filter items.
Use ctrl/cmd + click to select multiple items.
Click one item, hold shift and click on another item to select all items in between.
Category settings
In each category, you can add spaces, links, and subcategories (available in version 6.1 and up).
To edit a category’s settings, go to the Site Builder and click a category’s Cogwheel > Edit category.
Setting | Description |
|---|---|
Name | Name of the category. |
Name key | Unique category key, which will be part of that category’s URL. |
Theme | Set the category’s theme. |
Custom logo | The logo which is shown in the category menu. |
Custom URL | Direct users to a custom URL when clicking the category in the category menu, for example a specific space within the category. Note that the category home and the subcategories are not usable when you set up a custom URL. |
Category admin: users | Add a user as category administrator, giving them permission to change the home page of a category and manage its users. They will always be able to see the category, but not necessarily all the subcategories in that category. Keep in mind, space permissions hold their effect so category admins cannot see spaces or subcategories restricted to them. |
Category admin: user groups | Add a user group as category administrator, giving them permission to change the home page of a category and manage its users. They will always be able to see the category, but not necessarily all the subcategories in that category. Keep in mind, space permissions hold their effect so category admins cannot see spaces or subcategories restricted to them. |
View permission | This category is visible to users that have view permission to any content (space, blog, link or module) added to this category. |
Tooltip | The text that appears when users hover their mouse over the category. |
Disable category home | Select to disable the home page for this category. When disabled, clicking a category in the navigation menu shows the category dropdown menu. |
Connect users to a category
Highlight which users in your organisation are responsible for a category with the Connect users functionality. This functionality is not related to any permissions, nor does it decide what content users can view. It is simply a way of displaying users who are organisationally connected to the category, for example to let other users know who to contact.
Speed up large Confluence instances
Categories can help you speed up sites on Confluence instances that have an exceptionally high amount of spaces. Read our performance tips to learn to set up up manual category permissions and to collapse subcategories.