Newbie question regarding categories

New user trying out the product. Looks good.

I'm confused about categories.

I do see that I can set up both speakers and sermons with categories.
When I set up the speaker and the sermon to the same category ie: Sunday Mornings then the sermons and speakers seem to display on the front-end.

However, that doesn't seem to fit the way that most churches would work (unless I'm missing the concept - which I suspect).

Sermon Categories that I was planning on using would look something like this:

• Sunday Morning
• Youth Ministry
• Adult Education
• Leadership Development

The immediate problem is that I have speakers that have sermons in multiple categories. If I tag the speaker with one of the categories, then the other sermons don't show up when I use the speakers list?

It would also seem very useful if the speaker categories could be a distinct category list from the sermon categories. ie: Regular speakers, guest speakers, conference speakers. I have a lot of different speakers and it would be nice to segregate them this way. But currently if I do that, no sermons show up.

Wondering if my thinking is wrong or my execution is wrong.

Thanks in advance.

The confusing thing is probably that categories in SermonSpeaker are completely optional. This means you only apply a category where you want and leave the others blank where you don't need it. Basically it's an advanced way of filtering the items.

In your case, I would suggest to apply the categories only to the sermons. You can leave the series and speakers without categeories for now.
In the menu item you then choose the category and the type (sermons) you want to filter on. It will then only check the sermon categories and filter on this. The categories set for speakers and series will not be used for filtering, but still would have impact for access restrictions (if the category is restricted).

If you like to categorize your speakers as well, just create a new tree of categories and assign those to the speakers.
You could then make a menu item only showing sermons from guest speakers by setting the category to "guest speaker" and the type to "speakers".

Hope that helped a bit. If something is still unclear (or new questions arise) just ask again

Thanks for the quick response -

There is still something about the Categories that I'm missing

Here is a simplified look at my category structure

Root
-Speakers
-- Preaching Pastors
-- Guest Speakers
-- Elders
- Teaching Categories
-- Sunday Morning
-- Adult Education
--- Leadership Development
--- First Steps
-- Special Events

I have a group of series - most on attached to Sunday Morning Category, but some attached to Adult Education and Special events.

When I am using a Series List, If I set the menu entry to root, then every series shows up. If I set the menu entry to Teaching Categories, then nothing shows up. If I set it to Sunday Morning, then the Sunday Morning series appear. Does the behavior of the component only look into subcategories when the special name of root is selected?

Thanks

The category "Root" basically disables category filtering, meaning all items will show regardless of the category.
If you select a category, only items of the selected category will be shown. Shubcategories will be shown (if enabled in the options) as category link.
This is how the Joomla core extensions (articles, contacts, weblinks) behave as well.

I'm working on the possibility to optionally show items from subcategories as well, but in the current release this isn't possible yet.

That is helpful - thanks for the response.