Modern Categories

The Modern Categories setting replaces the theme based category output with one that's configured to use our best practices. This resolves:

• configurations with poor options
• CLS issues with the theme category
• bad accessibility support due to multiple links pointing to the same location
• improper use of <article> semantic tags on post links

Jump to:

• Layout
• Full Width
• Optimized pagination
• Image size
• Subcategory listing
• Other archives
• Search
• Yoast

Layout

The layout follows the recommended settings in the how to use categories page:

• 4-wide on desktop
• 2-wide on mobile
• only show the image and title

This is not customizable.

Full Width

While it's technically possible to select full-width layout for the category pages, we don't recommend this because:

• it's a desktop-first optimization, which makes up less than 20% of pageviews for most sites
• it removes your site-wide internal links to your trending posts and seasonal seasonal recipes, which negatively impacts SEO for your most important pages
• it messes with the desktop-to-mobile ratio (720px = 2x 360px) which can create layout issues

Personally, I'm a BIG fan of having the sidebar on a site. It's a strong sitewide signal for internal linking purposes.
But if someone was to remove it JUST from categories, I guess that would be something they could do… at least it wouldn't be "as harmful" as removing the sidebar completely.
I just personally don't see much value in doing this for most sites. It's purely cosmetic for desktop users only.

Casey Markee

Optimized pagination

The Modern Categories automatically exclude the introductory text when not on the first page of the categories.

Image size

This uses the default image size setting in the Feast Plugin (same image size as the FSRI block):

Ensure that the Modern Thumbnails are enabled for this.

Subcategory listing

We recommend against using subcategories in favor of a flatter site structure, but for users who have 500+ posts and have historically used subcategories, you can now generate a list of subcategories directly on the parent category.

Just to be extra clear: do not create subcategories (nested categories). This is only here to help bloggers who have made this mistake (in our opinion) in the past.

Other archives

You can enable this for all archives as well with the filter:

add_filter('feast_modern_categories_all_archives', __return_true );

Search

This format will be applied to the search pages as well, in a future release.

Yoast

We recommend going to Yoast > Search Appearance > Taxonomies > Social Title and removing the word "Archives" being appended to the end of each category.