Wordpress Tutorials

Do you know the hardest part of wordpress themes (includes premium also) ? They don’t provide you a theme which displays your category page in post titles or in post excerpts. Category pages are for navigation purposes. It will be hard for the readers to check the full content. We should respect the reader’s time. Before trying this tutorial make sure you take a backup of the file you are going to work with.

If your WordPress theme is displaying full posts on the category pages you can find the tutorial for changing it, showing only the post excerpts or the post titles below.

Note : Most of the WordPress themes have those  inside the archive.php or archives.php file.

1. Converting Your Category Page To Display Post Titles :

Displaying post titles is normally considered when you have a large number of posts on every category.
First open the mentioned file and find the post
loop. It normally looks like this :

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Now delete everything from that code to the end of the loop. It usually ends with this :

<?php endif; ?>

Replace the post loop code with the following different code loop for displaying only post titles :

<?php $temp_category = single_cat_title(”,false); if (!empty($temp_category)){ // give index ?>
<h1><?php single_cat_title(); ?></h1>
<p><?php echo(category_description(the_category_ID(false))); ?></p>
<?php if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></li><br>
<?php endforeach; else: ?>
<p><?php _e(‘Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.’); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php }else{ // give details or single post ?>
…Here Code For Normal Post Overview
<?php } ?>

Thats all. Now save the file and check your new category page !
You can add tags like <li> or<ol> for ordering the posts with number or bullets and you can also style your page in your style sheet.

2. Converting Your Category Page To Display Post Excerpts :

The file is same here. The codes will be similar to this only.

<?php if (is_category()) { ?>
<h2 class=’archives’>Archive for ‘<?php echo single_cat_title(); ?>’ CATEGORY</h2>
<?php }
elseif (is_day()) { ?>

Check the loop in that file. It will be like this normally.

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

After some lines of codes, you will find a argument that includes the full posts on category pages.

<?php the_content(__(‘Continue Reading…’));?>

For displaying the post excerpts,  substitute the above line with the following line.

<?php the_excerpt() ?>

Note : If you don’t want to show the author, date or comments information then consider removing the meta data information from those pages. They are  listed right after the post title.

Author Bio:

This Guest Post is written by S.Pradeep Kumar from HellBound Bloggers. Pradeep is a Technical Blogger. He blogs about all the technical and security related topics at his blog. You can contact him anytime through his Orkut Profile.

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