Make "Uncategorized" transparent

[ericmann]

When posts are created, they are placed into the Uncategorized category by default if no other category is specified. This causes problems when re-categorizing later on because you have to both add the new category and remove the "uncategorized" category at the same time.

"Uncategorized" should be automatically removed when marking categories on a post.

"Uncategorized" should not appear in the list of categories on the "Categories" page but in a separate section below reading "You currently have XX uncategorized posts."

Listing Uncategorized in the categories table presents the illusion that it is a separate category by itself that can be modified and removed - it can't, so it shouldn't be listed there.

Listing Uncategorized in the categories table presents the illusion that it is a
separate category by itself that can be modified and removed - it can't [...]

This is not true. "Uncategorized" is just another category. After a fresh install a category is created with tag_ID = 1 and named "Uncategorized" (in English, or as the translation file specifies). A link category named "Blogroll" is also created.

To start categorizing your posts, select what the name of your default category should be and rename this category. Later you may change the default category to another one.

The is no such thing as uncatagorized posts. They just have the initial category named "Uncategorized". Nothing else is special about that.

If anything should be done to make this a bit clearer, I would suggest an initial description of this category to be set to "You may rename this category (name and slug)".

If I could, I'd rephrase this as "Make categories optional."

Unless another category is specified as the "default" category, all posts should properly be "uncategorized" by default. But "uncategorized" itself should not behave in the UI like a category by itself. It should be as transparent as possible to the user, more of a placeholder until users can properly categorize content than anything else.

So my recommendation is that there should be such a thing as uncategorized posts with the option to specify a default catchall category on top of that.

Some background: I believe the uncategorized category was added for 2 purposes (although I might be wrong on both counts)

• To have a place holder for the evil %category% URL token
• Simpler themes: "Entry posted in: ..."

I think it wa part of the conversion of one category per post to any number. Themes using the_category() would suddenly be expecting exactly one category when that might not be the case. My history is fuzzy as it was before my time, alas.

I think most of the core team has gone on record somewhere saying that Uncategorized should die and painful death. No one is sure how best to do that though.

I've thought about use cases for default terms for custom taxonomies, and whether abstracting out the default category to all taxonomies will in turn make it easier to turn off. Seems a bit backwards, though.

Related/duplicate: #11576