I often struggle to find a Community category that I know exists. The top levels on the landing page are fine and dandy, but once I start burrowing down into lower levels, I get tired of going down all the wrong rabbit holes, and often give up in frustration.
Maybe that’s partly why people dump so much content into Just Chatting???
Is there some master list…a tree diagram, perhaps…that lets you quickly scan all the categories at a glance?
Tagging @LievenDV
Tom, use this landing page view for Categories:
https://community.justinguitar.com/categories
The top 5 categories are all designed to incorporate member topics and posts.
Then there is a category for Lieven and I to post our tips.
Announcements is what it says.
There are four categories that contain discussion on the paid for products the first of which is also for website discussion:
Each grade of the courses has its own category:
There are multiple categories for some hidden gems around the website:
I also went to that start place many times. But I also have struggled a lot. Gave up many times. Search result for certain things gave me so many categories to look in, without really finding what I was searching for.
When I was looking for song writing, composing, production and show cases of it, I had to go to so many different categories and it was very confusing and didn’t make any sense to have it spread as it is.
With that said, I have some experience in making website and much less content than there is here, and yet it was seriously hard to make a good structure with good overview.
It is enormous the amount of content here and I think they have done amazing job, because I have experience on how hard it is. The work that goes behind it is huge. It takes so much time and effort to make, even for very experienced people.
I have no good suggestion, other than the whole song writing, composing, production and show cases ought to have it’s own area, where people who go that way, can have their own post, like a learning log. - Because, that will make it so much more easy for others who want to get into this.
But with time, we beginners will also be long time users and not have issues. It’s seriously hard as beginner though. Still I will say it’s an amazing good work all in all. 
I was thinking something like this:
I thing this would let us see everything much more clearly.
I just copied and pasted into my iPad’s Notes app, and was surprised to find that all the links were preserved, and are clickable. So maybe I can do the legwork here and create the tree document for all the categories.
But it’s of little value unless it’s actually on the website, and not buried here in an obscure topic that few will see.
How would we put it on the website?
I just signed up for the Discourse Meta site, and see that some others are trying to figure out how to implement similar functionality.
I guess I was hoping this was an existing feature that the devs could just turn on, but that’s probably not the case.
Hi all,
An interesting idea that’s worth exploring.
An elegant, text based solution applied to relevant categories could be an interesting route.
I can imagine it works well on some and less on other categories
(ex: for the lesson categories we could skip that because the title does better expectation management than the more “community based” categories)
There are out-of-the-box alternative ways to display sub categories as well but because of curent design and information architecture it isn’t ideal to deploy that as-is.
Allow me to wrap up with this: This is a usable idea that will be explored as a concept but currently without any promises or timings
Thanks for giving this idea serious consideration…while realistically managing expectations.
In the meantime, I’m going to continue experimenting with manually screen scraping the Categories page, with the aim of producing a fully expanded tree of categories.
If it works out, hope it will provide some value to the community, and require zero effort from the Devs and Moderators.
Looks like this will work…it’s just a matter of grinding through it…
Need to figure out how to eliminate blank lines in bulleted lists though - too much white space!
Tom - thanks so much for caring, sharing and doing some graft on this.
Much appreciated.
Like this?
Yes! How do you do that in the Discourse editor?
…and now I’m flummoxed.
10 days ago, i was able to effortlessly copy and paste from the Categories page into my iPad’s Notes app, with all links preserved.
Today, it’s fighting me tooth and nail to even do the selection…insisting on popping up the linked page instead of selecting the text.
Don’t think I’m doing anything different…maybe the recent changes to Discourse software changed something?
!@#$% computers!
In any case, I’m dead in the water right now. Did desktop SW for decades, but don’t know anything about Web design.
Sigh.
Just for “fun” (though it actually wasn’t fun at all) I set Bing AI loose on this problem, and this is what it did see next reply for issues:
Bing AI: Okay, I can make the categories links as well. Here they are:
Before I go any further…
I am not asking for help with this…from anybody…unless they feel like exploring this with me!
In some ways, this is kind of amazing - I asked it to create a list of category and subcategory links, and it did it - sort of.
The format is how i wanted it, but it gave up on sub categories after the first few, and linkable categories as well about halfway down.
I only checked Community Hub subcats, but they are partly wrong - some of them match the actual website, some of them don’t. I have not checked if the list of top level categories is correct.
Many of the links are bad.
So, not a magic solution by any means.
But fascinating - I can see the potential. But a long way to go before this is actually useful.
Highlight the text and click on the bulleted list icon.
Or, manually type an asterix then a space in front of all items you want listed.
It contains all the main categories sorted alphabetically, along with all their respective subcategories. I’ve added both the category names and URLs for your ease.
TL;DR - You can extract all the categories and their urls from the Categories page source code. I’ve copied everything into Excel, and from there on it’s just a matter of sorting, find-replacing and formatting. You’re welcome.
I’m working on an official post to go in announcements.
Thanks
Thanks Richard - you always give the best help!
I don’t see that list tool icon on my editor
Spent a few minutes trying to figure out if it was an option I could turn on in my settings, but gave up without finding anything.
I was able to get it to work by manually entering the Markdown formatting code (- or *) in front of each list item.
My question was mainly about the extra white space that I got when I did it this way - when you did it, there was much less wasted screen space, which I really like.
In any case, this is a minor detail if I can’t get the basic two level fully expanded tree structure to work.
Nothing is ever simple with this stuff.
Thanks so much for the excel file, Jeff!
I was pretty sure that someone with the right knowledge and the right tooling could bang this out quickly. I’m not that person, and keep getting lost in the weeds.
When I look at the whole list, I can’t help but be impressed by the sheer volume of content Justin has accumulated over the years. I’m seeing categories that I wasn’t aware of, and want to explore.
My next challenge will be to figure out how to make my Apple iPad play nice with a Microsoft file format.
It is underway …
Richard
Looking good and you obviously have much work to do to cover all of the elements.
A quick thought re the OM section, could you make the “How They Work” guide visible in this list. I think a static spotlight would be better than me kicking off now and then, when folks have patently not read the darn guide. Just a thought.
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