How to show category hierarchy with dropdown_cats

Don’t remember ever seeing it. Which doesn’t mean it’s impossible…

The trick is that an HTML select list is, by nature, pretty one-dimensional. So you have to insert dashes or spaces to make it look hierarchical (if I spelled that right I want a cookie).
So your drop down list actually has stuff like:

CatA
- SubCat1
- SubCat2
-- SubCata
--- subcatii
CatB
- SubCat 3

Ok, that look isn’t a big deal. But then you have to “decode” it on the form post side to actually figure out that ” — SubCatB” is a real category. By decode, in this case I guess I mean strip leading whitespace and dashes.

Impossible? Not at all. And look, verbose pseudo-code!

Hi HandySolo et al.

I hope this isn’t bad form, but I went and modified the dropdown_cats code to re-sort the select options to indicate hierarchy as we discussed above. For a rather poor example (only one level of category nesting) see:

https://www.benjaminkeen.com/

The code is pretty clean & efficient, builds on the existing code and is backward compatible (defaulting to no nesting). I added two new parameters to allow users to indicate they want to show the hierarchy and specify their choice of nesting mark (defaulting to — – a dash! – like in the WordPress UI).

I’m not sure what the process is, but I can post the code here, on my website or send it to you guys if need be…

Awesome script. Thanks guys!