Block audit: Categories

[kjellr]

Note: We'll be doing these audits in waves and editing this as we work through the blocks, so this text will be updated and fleshed out as we progress. See the full picture here.

Overview

Name: Categories
Description: Display a list of all your site’s categories.
*Category: Widgets
CSS class: wp-block-categories, wp-block-categories-list
Can be converted to: Nothing

States

Empty/Selected/Placeholder

Unselected:

Primary (toolbar) settings

Align Left, Align Center, Align Right, Align Full

Secondary (sidebar) settings

Categories Settings: Display as dropdown, Show Post Counts, Show Hierarchy

Frontend appearance

Gutenberg Starter Theme

Atomic Blocks

twentyseventeen

twentyten

Bugs/errors

Individual issues will be opened for these soon

• Front-end renders an aligncenter class, regardless of alignment settings (Alignment: categories block forces aligncenter regardless of what is selected in the toolbar #7910)

Suggestions

Individual issues will be opened for these soon

• This block is rendered inside of a container div, while the similar Archives and Latest Post blocks are rendered directly as uls. Reasoning behind this is unclear. (Why is the Categories block rendered inside a div, while other similar blocks are not? #9411)
• We should sync up alignment options with the Archives block. (Sync up alignment options for the Archives and Categories blocks #9413)
• I'd love to see some additional visual styles for this list.

[melchoyce]

I'd love to see some additional visual styles for this list.

+1 — see #1464 (comment) for some potential ideas we could consider for categories as well.

[sarahmonster]

It looks as though all issues here have been filed or discussed elsewhere, so I'm going to go ahead and close this tracking issue out. Feel free to reopen (or file new issues!) if anything requires further debate. 💪