We're planning to use the categories for a couple of different dimensions, like where an event takes place, who does the event, whether it's a regular event or just a single event and the like (I'm aware that this is a bit redundant - but using categories for this allows users to efficiently browse for the events they are looking for simply using the categories; I've also considered using multiple calendars but one list of categories seems like the most approachable way from a usability perspective).
Currently, categories are sorted by alphabet which counteracts this approach as it would mix all the different "dimensions" of categories. The ideal solution would be hierarchial categories, so there could be a few "parent categories" (like "Location", "Teacher", "Type of Event"), with the relevant sub-categories. Obviously, in this specific case the parent categories would never be assigned to events but I don't see a problem with that as long as I can have my structure ;-)
An alternative solution would be at least being able to manually define the order of the categories, so we could easily arrange the categories in a logical order - and even put those "parent categories" in (we could use spaces for indenting the actual categories).
Currently, we're using the ugly "prefix to get stuff into the right order"-hack, so we have some categories without any prefix (those come first), some with a dot (".") come next (and this is really ugly), and then we have some with a blank-space-prefix (those come last, and it's not looking too bad). |