Multiple Categories with the same name

If you set up Sheet Music and Learn to Play as categories, can you make piano, violin, etc. TAGS instead? Or flip flop them.

I’m not sure, I haven’t used tags… take another example:

Cooking
-Mexican
-Italian
-French
TV Industry Guidelines
-Programming
-Advertising
Languages
-English
-Spanish
-French
Programming
-Languages
-Software
-Hardware
Internet How-Tos
-Email
-Web Design
-Advertising
-Searching

Ok, so the topics might seem unrelated but I wanted to demonstrate how the category names can be the same but have completely different meanings. Also the same named categories may not be at the same level in the category hierarchy.

I think tags are useful for searching so it may be acceptable that the same tag be used for dissimilar topics, but I don’t see how you can easily use that to categorise and sort your posts by category so readers can find them hierarchically.

Any thoughts?

Maybe I’m missing something, but I just tried this out:

Test category 1
– child category
Test category 2
– child category

And it worked fine. I set the parent categories up first, and then added the child category twice – once for each parent. I even used the same category slug, although you could probably use different ones on the child categories to differentiate which parent each was under.

hi jayabb…

WordPress won’t let you create the categories under the manage categories section… however, you can create categories with the same name under the write a post page.

—

EDIT: Actually I just created a bunch duplicate categories and then went into manage cats and they’re all gone. Guess you cant do this.. Sorry

so to have a structure like jayabb is describing:

Sheet Music
-Piano
-Violin

Learn to Play
-Piano
-Violin

is not possible? i can’t believe something like this can’t be done in wordpress…

can anyone confirm?

thanks in advance.

stuck on the same problem …
I really don’t think this can be done… :'(

You can easily do this –

Sheet Music
-Piano
-Violin

Learn to Play
-Piano
-Violin

You just have to make sure that, when you create the categories, the slugs are unique.

It’s best to make the slugs as descriptive as possible of their parent as you can, because it will make the URL more sensible if you are using pretty permalinks.

@mrmist your solution works, but how could you have the link to “Violin” bring up all the posts with the different violin categories, since they all have different slugs?

You could not, but then I am not sure why that would be the case, as the two are not necessarily related at all, being in two distinct branches. It would be a seperate enhancement I think to have inter-linked sub cats.

I worked out how to name 2 categories exactly the same.

First create the 2 categories with different names and different slugs

– Piano (piano)
– Piano 2 (piano-2)

Then, go and edit the 2nd category and rename it to Piano. This works perfectly.

As I see it, you cannot “add” 2 categories with the same name, but you can “edit” a category and rename it to another categories name.