Quick tip: How to make the ‘Categories’ box bigger when writing WordPress posts

I’ve written at a couple blogs, including my own and Blog Herald (here), and quite often, I see that there are quite a number of post categories to choose from in order to tag my posts appropriately.

Below, you can see a typical listing of available post categories that you can use on a WordPress blog. As you can see, though, there are so many categories that the box requires a scroll bar.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see many more categories than what the default settings offer you?

Now, what we want to do is to expand this box so that we can fit more, or preferably, all, of the post categories so that we don’t have to scroll as much when we want to categorize our posts! (I would imagine that this box is, by far, the most commonly used one out of all of the other ones that are available on the ‘New Post’ page of the WordPress admin.)

In order to do this, all you have to do is modify the following file (the path is relative to your WordPress’ root path):

/wp-admin/wp-admin.css

In this file, look for the first occurrence of the following line:

#categorychecklist {

Below that, there should be

height: 12em;

Change the number ’12’ to something bigger, such as 25em instead, so that it now looks like:

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height: 25em;

The final result should look like:

And voila, you’ve got every single post category at your disposal without requiring the use of a scroll bar! It’s a minor convenience, but one that can save you plenty of time in the long run.

Please note that you have to apply this change every time you upgrade your copy of WordPress, because it requires modifying a core file of WordPress.

Gary King is a professional freelance web developer, primarily using Ruby on Rails and PHP to create cool new websites. When he’s not trying to take over the world one blog at a time, you can find him mulling over his thoughts at King Gary.