Organization of many bundles (like System Preferences.app)

Question

I'm working on a project which organizes many separate bundles onto a System Preferences-like screen, in categories.

First, how does System Preferences organize its pref panes into categories? A quick glance in the pref panes' bundles reveals no obvious category info.

Second, how should I organize my bundles into categories? Right now, I've got nested bundles, where the category bundles are pretty much just an Info.plist with the category's name and the order of its sub-bundles.

This is, of course, disgusting to manage in Xcode. I've tried separate projects; I've tried one big project with many targets; nothing seems clean.

Answer 1

First question: System Preferences organizes its pref panes by categories in a very simple way: the first 4 categories are reserved to Apple, and they organize the items in it in a way they like.
Your pref pane will be added to the category Other, ordered among the others pref panes by alphabetic order.

Second question: I would do one project for the "System Preferences like.app", and as many project as pref panes.
If you want to have a way to build the "System Preferences like" app and all its pref pane at once, add the pref pane projects as a dependency to the "System Preferences like" project.