Advanced Categories Widget by: darrinb

Display your categories in style with the new Advanced Categories Widget! This categories widget gives you enhanced features for customizing your site’s categories list.

Build a better category list.

The Advanced Categories Widget is a powerful and flexible category widget for WordPress that makes building and displaying custom category lists a snap.

Organize your site in style with this highly customizable category widget!

Features

  • Build multiple lists!
  • Select which categories to display.
  • Choose how to order your categories: name, post count, etc.
  • Set the order for displaying the categories.
  • Supports category thumbnails.
  • Set and preview custom thumbnail sizes, or choose from your site’s registered image sizes.
  • Show a description of each category.
  • Set and preview the length of the description.
  • Select the list format to match your site’s markup. Choose from: ol, ul, or div.
  • Show post count.
  • Choose the default (basic) CSS styling or roll your own.

Multiple Lists Support

Do you have a lot of categories? Do you want to highlight different categories in different sections of your site? With the Advanced Categories Widget, you can easily create more than just a boring categories list.

advanced-categories-widget-filter-settings

Custom Thumbnail Sizes

With the Advanced Categories Widget, you can set and preview a custom thumbnail size to display in your sidebar. Already have the perfect size thumbnail? The widget also detects all registered images sizes and creates an easy way to choose which to display. And with WordPress 4.4, responsive images are natively supported using built-in core functionality.

advanced-categories-widget-thumbnail-preview

Note: The Advanced Categories Widget is compatible with the Advanced Term Images plugin for displaying featured images for categories.

Custom Category Descriptions

Draw your readers in by displaying a brief description of each category in your list. The Advanced Categories Widget provides an easy way to set the length of the excerpts that will appear. And with a handy preview feature, you can see a sample excerpt set to the length you choose, before saving your settings.

advanced-categories-widget-description-preview

Default CSS Styles

The Advanced Categories Widget comes installed with a default stylesheet option to get you going. The styling is based on the twentysixteen core theme. Selecting the Default Styles option will give you a quick start to styling your categories list. For more control over the look and feel of your list, the widget also has a number of classes available to further customize its appearance to match your theme.

advanced-categories-widget-layout-settings

The Resulting List

With a little bit of styling (to keep it in-style with your site) the resulting list can look similar to this:

categories-list

Installation

As of this writing, the plugin is awaiting review by the plugin team at the WordPress.org repository, but in the meantime, you can download and install off of GitHub. Just follow the instructions below.

From GitHub:

  1. Download the latest stable version.
  2. Extract the zip folder to your plugins directory.
  3. Activate in the “Plugins” area of your admin by clicking the “Activate” link.
  4. No further setup or configuration is necessary; just head over to your Widgets area to add to your sidebar.

Usage

Using it out of the box is really straight-forward. The Advanced Categories Widget functions like any other widget for WordPress. You can either configure one it through the Widgets screen in your WordPress Dashboard (Appearance > Widgets) or through your the Customizer (Appearance > Customizer).

Note: Unlike the default Categories widget that comes pre-installed with WordPress, the Advanced Categories Widget assigns unique IDs to each list created. So feel free to create as many category lists with as many configurations as you’d like!