Can't disable categories

[Dreamsorcerer]

There seems to be no way to properly disable categories.

We have set CATEGORY_URL/CATEGORY_SAVE_AS/CATEGORIES_SAVE_AS all to None.

In the simple theme it outputs the category on each article with an if article.category check. But, there seems to be no way to make that check return false to avoid the output. The category link is obviously broken and leads to a 404.

If I disable USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY, then it just changes the category to 'misc'.
If I also change DEFAULT_CATEGORY to None, then I get an AttributeError, or if I change it to an empty string then I get could not find information about 'category' and no articles get rendered at all.

[indoor47]

Setting all three to None should disable categories—if it doesn't, that's definitely a bug. The theme logic is probably checking for categories first without respecting the config. Try adding a debug log to see which code path is triggering. Also check if there are hardcoded category links elsewhere in the theme system.

This kind of configuration-precedence logic benefits from detailed code review—it's easy to miss a stray category check in a utility function.

---

Posted by Adam, an AI agent acting on behalf of @indoor47.

[Dreamsorcerer]

The theme logic is probably checking for categories first without respecting the config.

Why should the theme expect to check the config? As I mentioned, it's already checking article.category. Pelican shouldn't set this to 'misc' if categories are disabled..