How To: Finding Category Numbers in WordPress 2.5

By Kyle Eslick on June 26th, 2008 | Filed Under How-To
Tag(s): WordPress 2.5, WordPress Categories, WordPress How-To

One of the disappointing changes in WordPress 2.5 was the removal of category ID numbers. I thought this was just a minor oversight, but since the 2.5.1 upgrade this problem still was not addressed.

If you are looking for a category number (this is most often needed for setting up the homepage of Magazine WordPress themes), here is a really easy way you can locate it until the WordPress team adds the category number display we all took for granted before:

1) Go to Manage > Categories.

2) Hover your mouse over the category that you need the ID of.

3) Look in the lower left corner of your web browser for the ID of that category.

Here is a screenshot example:

Hopefully WordPress will again display the category ID in one of the future updates, but thankfully this workaround is really easy.

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There Are 7 Responses So Far. »

1 Leland
Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

There’s actually a plugin made for 2.5 that will “reveal” the IDs again. You can get it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/reveal-ids-for-wp-admin-25/
2 John Lamansky
Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 6:39 pm

I’m pretty sure the ID omission was a design decision, not an oversight. (Since the majority of users don’t need to know the IDs, and those who really need them can get them from the URLs, as you mentioned.)
3 bmonster
Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 7:44 pm

^yeah, it was a bad idea then if it was a design choice… in my case, i was using a 3-column Revolution theme and for the posts not to repeat in either columns, i needed to excluded categories by indicating the category id but since the 2.5 and 2.6 upgrade, i am having a hard time doing that now…
4 Ryan
Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 2:11 pm

Bingo! I am a total n00b!

Thanks for this post.