Issue: Hierachrical Category

What you are asking is a major re-design of the category system for what seems like almost no benefit. Even if the category system worked in this way, you would still want to choose what category to display in a navigation widget. If you want virtual root-level categories to appear in the widget without requiring a choice when you make the widget, that could be achieved by the existing design with a relatively simple query. The "Category" filter on the assignment tool for books/chapters, categories, and feeds works this way, and could potentially be useless due to the following:

If this is in response to my explanation in another thread about "top-level categories" and that they don't really exist, you can still make categories that look like that under the current design. I merely was pointing out that it is possible to have many categories, but also have 0 categories that don't have parents. There are two ways to avoid problems due to that:

• Always specify a starting-point context for a navigation widget
• Protect the categories that should act as "top-level" so that no one can add them as a child of another category. Note: a protected category cannot get any new children either.

Do you see any other benefits to a "hierarchical category system" apart from not having to specify widget context?