A grid says every category matters equally. Often that is not true — one or two carry most of your content and deserve more room.
Metro gives you tiles of different sizes in a fixed pattern, so the important categories read as important.
For every Taxonomy Listing setting in one place, see the Taxonomy Listing guide.
Before You Start
- Edition: Pro — the Taxonomy Listing block needs Nexter Blocks Pro.
- Block to enable: Taxonomy Listing, switched on under Nexter > Blocks in your WordPress dashboard.
- Terms that exist. The block lists your real taxonomy terms, so a site with one category shows one card.
- Images on your terms. Metro tiles are image-led; a tile without one is mostly empty space.
Steps
- Add the Taxonomy Listing block and set the layout to metro.
- Set the column count and pick a metro pattern per breakpoint, then publish.
How It Behaves
Metro is not a variation of grid. It renders differently, and the difference matters when you are debugging.
- Metro tiles use a CSS background image, not an
<img>tag. Measured on a 7-term listing: 0 image tags, 7 background images ontpgb-dy-cat-bg-img-metro. Grid and masonry do the opposite. - The pattern is written onto the block as data. Measured: a
data-metroAttrattribute carrying the column count and pattern name for desktop, tablet and mobile separately. - Each breakpoint gets its own pattern, because a pattern that works across four desktop columns rarely works across two on a phone.
- The category image comes from Nexter’s own term image field, set on the term itself when you edit it. It is not WordPress’s featured image and, on a product category, it is not WooCommerce’s category image either — those are stored separately and this block does not read them.
- A term with no image still renders one. Measured: removing a term’s image produced a card showing a generic placeholder shipped with the plugin, not a blank or broken image. That is why missing category images are easy to miss.
- The post count is shown by default. Measured on an untouched listing: each card rendered its real term count.
- Type a number into the item count; do not leave it blank. Measured on 5.0.6: a blank field renders one term rather than all of them, and so does
0. Reported to the developers. - Measured with Nexter Blocks Pro deactivated: the block renders nothing at all — not a wrapper, not a message, zero output. This is a Pro-only block.
Limitations
- Pro only — nothing renders with Pro deactivated.
- Background images are invisible to search engines and screen readers in a way an image tag is not. The term name is still real text, which is what carries the meaning here.
- The pattern repeats on a fixed cycle. If your term count does not divide neatly into it, the last row will look unbalanced.
- Which term lands in the big tile depends on order, not on importance. Use the ordering settings to put the right one first.
- For a pattern of your own, use the custom metro layout, which lets you write the tile sizes out.
Troubleshooting
The tiles are empty
Those terms have no image. Metro shows the image as a background, so a term without one is a coloured box with a label.
The wrong category is in the large tile
Tile sizes follow position, not importance. Reorder the terms so the one you want lands first.
The layout breaks on mobile
Set a separate pattern and column count for the mobile breakpoint. A desktop pattern rarely survives two columns.
The last row looks wrong
Your term count does not fill the pattern cycle. Adjust the item count, or use a custom pattern.
