Change the name of the Uncategorized category

Changing this category to “General” would look more professional in those times when you forget to categorize something.


Read-only archive: Issues · ClassicPress/ClassicPress · GitHub

Author: Code Potent

Vote count: 59

Status: open

Tags:

  • difficulty-moderate
  • request-modify-feature

Comments

But what if I want a category called “general”?
Which actually represents something very real?

Then all my posts would have a default that indeed shouldn’t be a default

Uncategorized is the right thing to use
We can even choose the default nowadays ourselves
If that’s not possible in cp then that would certainly make sense to have

Deciding for people how their uncategorized content is going to be categorized is the issue, not how it’s called, and the default should be as generic as possible, which the term “general” is certainly not.

I’ve myself that precise term used for “general” (tasks). I know of at least a couple sites who use that term for “general” in other category usages.

No category at all would make more sense.
Or as said the ability to choose your default category should actually solve this, and uncategorized is imo the right term, if we set a term for non-categorized items, which likely we shouldn’t

But then there are hundreds of websites reliying in the existence of said term in the queries (getting posts that are not uncategorized for example)

Those would break.

I also don’t know of any major work needed to work with uncategorized- can someone elaborate on the many hours of work wasted due to that category?

No vote from me for now.

2 Likes

You’re right. “General” is something I myself might use for a category.

The underlying design of not showing a category unless it has posts, combined with every post needing a category makes the uncategorized default the perfect solution. The name is exactly what it is: those posts that weren’t given a category deliberately.
I see nothing broken or needing a change in this.

1 Like

I think the problem this petition is getting at is where categories have no particular meaning on the front-end, or where the user has mistakenly failed to assign a category. In either case, while having the label set to “Uncategorized” is technically accurate, it looks unprofessional on the front-end. I recognize that omitting to add a category label could also be called unprofessional, but we are talking about a default here, and defaults should look acceptable.

I am now wondering whether something like “Miscellaneous” would be a better default label, though I have no idea how that works for localization.

But why is this unprofessional?
It’s clear in all languages I know: no category.
I don’t see any “unprofessional” meaning here.

The content I am viewing does not belong to any specific category
It’s … uncategorized

Any other term might really have a meaning that is more specific, and thus inadequate to communicate that status of “not belonging to any specific category”

No category at all also wouldn’t help because you’ll want an archive of those “non categorized things”, so people can still view it in a stream.

This, together with the ability to set a default category on my own should be enough.
If I don’t like uncategorized for some reason I can use any other, like “miscellaneous”, or “none”, or “mixed” or anything really.

One could argue that tags don’t have that, neither custom taxonomies, and thus they won’t appear in any archive, so that could make sense in categories too. This I think is a valid point.

It’s unprofessional because, by definition, it’s saying “Not categorized”. Which means it’s either irrelevant or has been somehow overlooked.

Being technically accurate isn’t always the same as being professional.

2 Likes

The design of this feature is insane. “Uncategorized” should mean “no categories set”. This is reflected in the weird UI behavior where “Uncategorized” is treated like a special option that checks itself when you uncheck other categories, and all the other special-case code around the “default category” misfeature.

To put it another way, under the current design, you can have no categories ([]) or you can have some categories (['miscellaneous']) or you can also set null as a category ([null] or ['miscellaneous', null]). Everything gets the null category by default… and null or Uncategorized is… still just another category under the hood. You can even assign Uncategorized along with another category if you really want to.

This is a seriously flawed design. However, I think we are stuck with it: changing this would break a lot of things for relatively little benefit. So I think the right thing to do is to close this petition.

1 Like

Just chiming in and would vote against any change if I were to vote on this kind of petition. “No category set” is the correct way to define such a use-case. Second choice is “undetermined” or “undecided” or “miscellaneous” or “general,” in order of preference.

But the BEST relevancy would be You have not Selected a Category for this Post or a Admin_Notice to remind person for a cat to be entered.

Even BETTER: “Welcome to ClassicPress, Please set a Default Category for Your General Posts.” Wherein admin setting up a new site would be prompted to DEFINE the default category; similar to how they enter the site-title and site-description.

4 Likes