Genres and status

Two separate lists, both under Web Novels, and both editable. They are what your library filters on, so they are worth getting right before you have three hundred novels using them.

Genres

Web Novels ▸ Genres.

What a novel is. Several per novel, and this is the list readers actually browse.

Fantasy, Action, Adventure, Romance, Drama, Comedy, Mystery, Slice of Life and Science Fiction is a reasonable base. Add what your library actually needs: Xianxia, Wuxia, Isekai, LitRPG, Murim and System are what many translation sites live on, and JormunTL ships with those.

Resist adding a genre that will only ever hold one novel. A genre page with one entry is a dead end for the reader who clicked it, and the count in this table is how you spot them.

Status

Web Novels ▸ Status.

Where a novel is in its life. Exactly one per novel.

JormunTL ships three, and three is all there are. A status answers one question a reader has, and that question has three answers:

You can rename any of them, and that is the intended way to make them yours. The theme matches on the slug, never the label, so calling Hiatus “Dropped” or Ongoing “Currently Translating” changes what readers see and breaks nothing. The homepage sidebar widget takes its own heading from whatever you call it.

You cannot add a fourth or delete one of the three. That is deliberate. The list used to be open, and seven statuses shipped in it: Ongoing and Currently Translating meant the same thing, so did Hiatus and On Hold, and Licensed described a legal event rather than the state of a translation. Readers got a filter with seven buttons for three real answers, and parts of the theme quietly stopped working because they were matching on slugs that a site might or might not have.

If you are upgrading, nothing is lost. Novels move to the closest of the three and old links keep working:

/status/dropped/ and the rest redirect to where their novels went, so anything already linked or indexed still lands somewhere sensible.

Every novel gets one

A new novel is Ongoing unless you say otherwise, and that includes novels arriving from an import. You are never left with a novel that has no status — which used to print the words “No Status” on its page, draw an empty badge on its card, and make it invisible to every status filter at once.

Setting a status yourself always wins; the default only ever fills a blank.

Both are ordinary WordPress taxonomies

Each has its own archive page, each can be renamed without touching the novels using it, and both appear in the homepage builder as something a section can filter by.