There are plenty of to-do lists out there where you can drag and drop to sort individual items, but I wanted to take it a step further and introduce categories. I wanted the categories containing the items to be sortable themselves, and not just within one column but several so it would maximize use of the web page layout’s width. The main use case I had in mind was for a grocery list, where type of food would be the categories. But it could be used for other things like a movie collection (genres as categories) or a sports league player roster (team names as categories).

A table of contents for my series on building a drag and drop categorized item list app with jQuery and ASP.NET MVC.