2008-09-21 
If you are a simple WordPress publisher, you probably won’t even notice this. When WP 2.5 was introduced, it had a major redesign from older versions.
The good old Dashboard we known to love had a major face lift which carried over to version 2.6.
There was one thing missing on the new Dashboard. The ID numbers for Posts and Categories are no longer been displayed.
Previous versions of WordPress shows category name then the ID number associated with that category or Posts right next to each other.
So where are they now? See the image above. In WordPress 2.5 and 2.6, Instead of displaying the ID number on the web page itself, now they will be displayed on your web browser’s status bar.
All you have to do is hover your mouse over the categories and it will display Cat IDs for each one.
These ID number are important if you are running third-party plug-ins and custom WordPress coding. For example I use Category IDs all the time if I want to exclude certain ones from being displayed.
Another example would be to setup a most popular posts or recent posts app then tell WordPress which categories to include and which ones not to. There are endless things you can do with Cat and Post IDs.
November 29th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Thanks for sharing this - what a ridiculous thing to leave out by the WP developers, the ID columns are hugely useful, hopefully this will be amended in later versions…
October 11th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
You are very welcome. I’m glad you found the tutorial helpful. I think they moved it to the status bar to keep a clean layout on the dashboard.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:34 am
Thanks a bundle for this. No wonder I couldn’t freaking locate the ID numbers. -.-”
Why the hell did they remove that?! Sigh.