Have you ever noticed that the category names in your administration content tree aren’t always the same color? Do you know what the different colors mean? Typically the category names are black with teal highlighting on the selected category, but it is possible to come across categories that are blue, gray, or even red. We’ll decode the category colors for you in this article.

Blue is used for categories that are private. An example of a blue category is the Trash, where deleted categories and documents are stored.

You can find the Trash in the content tree, at the very bottom of the section called Other.

If you want to hide a category on your website, you can change its status from public to private. To do this, first go to the category, hover over the yellow edit icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and then select Settings.

Use the dropdown menu on the right to change the status of the category, and save.

If you don’t want visitors to see new categories you are adding and working on until they’re finished, you can change the settings to make all newly created categories automatically private.

This option is located under the Settings tab. It’s near the bottom of the page where it says Default Status of New Content Created. If you choose Private and save, all the new categories you create (as well as documents, products, discussions, etc.) will be blue automatically. Once you’re done working on your new content you can manually switch it to public.

You can also schedule when content will be hidden or shown using category settings. If you, for example, want to publish a new article at an exact time on an exact day, select the option Show from Date. With the help of the little calendar located in the field, you can easily choose a date and time. Then click on Select Date and Time, and don't forget to save.

Now that the category has been hidden, you can see that the category name has changed to gray in the content tree. This allows you to see at first glance that the category is temporarily hidden.

For this feature to work correctly, you will need to set your time zone under the Registration Settings tab for your Webgarden account.

If your website has multiple administrators, each of which is responsible for only a particular part of the website, you may also come across red categories. If a category is red, that means that it cannot be edited under the login you are currently using. You can read further about options for access rights settings in our advanced help article Set Access Rights.

The color differences in categories are primarily for quick identification of which content can and cannot be seen by visitors, as well as which content can and cannot be edited.