Presenting categories management to the user

Question

I'm creating a page in my webapp which should be for displaying and managing the categories.

As you can probably tell I don't have much experience about user experience so I came here to ask.

I have about 7000 categories. And I have about 10 parent category. So each category belongs to one of 10 parent categories.

Now the admin should be able to add category/category system and to delete both. My biggest worry at the moment is how to display all these categories.

I was thinking tree like menu(with expand/collapse functionality) i.e :

*parent category   *parent_category two
 - category one     - category four
 - category two     - category five

And do it like this for each category system, but it would stretch to much vertically. As someone who had more part in user experience do you think this is a good idea or how these can be arranged/presented so the user has better experience?

Answer 1

It sounds like a big problem is going to be finding a specific sub-category to use it and prevent duplication. You might want to have some sort of a 'search' edit field that has an 'auto-suggest'. The values could display the related parent category as they are suggested.

To show the whole list you would need some way to keep the parent entries while scrolling through the sub-categories. One possibility would be an accordion view with a scrolling list inside it. Sort these sub-values and make them searchable (as above).

When an item is selected in the search you would make it appear in the secondary panel.