Custom Category order in a Categories Field

Question

I have a load of projects, each of which can have zero or more categories which indicate the particular type(s) of work involved. As well as using these categories to produce a 'category page' of filtered entries, they are also pulled through to each index page listing, to show the types of work involved in that particular project.

Therefore, these ideally should be ordered by priority, so one project may feature more use of category 1 so that would want to come first, whereas one project may feature more use of category 2.

For Assets Fields (and I think also Entries Fields), I seem to be able to order the respective elements by dragging and dropping them in the field, but for Categories Fields, the order seems to be determined by the order of the Structure in the Categories page in the CMS.

Is there a way of allowing the user to customise the order the Categories in a Categories field?

Thanks!

Answer 1

No, it’s not possible to change the order of related categories.

(Think of the field as a big checkbox list; you can change which checkboxes are checked, but you can’t change their order. The only reason it’s not a simple checkbox list is to save visual space.)

If you really want to be able to set the order, you can put the Categories field inside a Matrix field, where each block selects a single category, and then you can reorder the blocks.