User Guide

Creating Category Groups for eeSiteKit

You will need to set up one Category Group for each Channel in your site. eeSiteKit uses the categories within these groups to help create all of your site’s navigation, and to help organize the site’s content. Once your Category Groups are created, Categories may be added to the Category Groups at anytime.

For example, in this site (eeSiteKit.com) we have Category Groups set up for:

  • Home
  • Features
  • Products
  • User Guide
  • About Us
  • Attributes (used to organize the content you see in the footer of all pages)
All other top-level navigation links directly to non-Channel-based content, so we didn’t need a Category Group for it.

Disable EE’s Auto-Assign Category Parents

ExpressionEngine installs with a feature called “Auto-Assign Category Parents” enabled. You will want to disable this feature here:

Site Name ›  Admin ›  Weblog Administration ›  Global Weblog Preferences

To disable this feature, select “No” next to “Auto-Assign Category Parents” and click the Update button.

You’ll only need to do this once for your whole site.

We recommend you set the “Word Separator for URL Titles” to “Dash” while you are there. eeSiteKit will work fine with “Dash” or “Underscore”. We have better results with Google search when using a dash.

Setting Up Category Groups

By default, ExpressionEngine installs a default group that eeSiteKit does not use. Depending on your situation, you may want to save, rename or delete that group. Do not delete the default Category Group in a live website that is using it. If you have existing content assigned to categories in that group, deleting it may disrupt the navigation of the live site.

In these instructions, we’ll set up a Category Group called “About Us”

To set up a new Category Group, navigate to the Category Management area of the control panel.

Admin > Weblog Administration > Category Management

  1. Create a New Category Group (big green button)
  2. Name of category group: About Us
  3. All other settings on this page are optional and you are encouraged to refer to EE’s documentation to learn more about them
  4. Click Submit
  5. Repeat these steps for each of the Channels of your site

If you are configuring eeSiteKit for a multilingual website, you will also want to read about setting up Alternate-Language Custom Category Fields.