Porous materials with hierarchical bi- or trimodal poresize distributions are a special type of nanomaterials with ordered arrays of uniform nanochannels. These materials have important applications in a wide variety of fields such as separation, catalysis, adsorption, advanced nanomaterials. Here we present an exploratory study on the fabrication of hierarchically ordered porous oxide and metal membranes by templating methods. The obtained membranes have ordered hierarchical nanopore array structures with high aspect ratio and narrow pore size distribution. The adsorption and catalytic properties of the hierarchically ordered nanoporous materials have been investigated.