Sharing Category Templates
WordPress has an amazing theming system. It’s not perfect, but if you know the right things you can bend it to your will and do a lot of cool things. One great thing about it is the template hierarchy; WordPress basically allows you to create custom templates for categories, tags, authors, etc.
For example, if I add category.php to my theme, all category pages will now be styled according the structure within the category.php file. Now, let’s say I have a category called “Photos” that I wanted to look a little different from the rest. (Let’s assume the category ID for “Photos” is 6). All I have to do is add category-6.php to my theme, modify it to whatever, and the “Photos” category page will switch to this new template. Cool? Definitely.
With a system like this, you could technically customize your site to the point where the every category, author, tag, etc. page has a unique look and feel. But, that’s quite a lot of work and in most cases unnecessary. There may be cases though, where you want a small subset of categories to have a unique look, and you want these pages to share this look. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t allow different pages to share templates. (Intuitively, I would think that something like creating a file called category-6,7,8.php [or similar] would apply this template to categories 6, 7, and 8). You could technically set up separate files (category-6.php / category-7.php / category8.php) and just copy and paste the code across all of them, but that’s a maintenance nightmare. A single change will have to be copied over multiple times, and that’s just annoying.
There are a few ways around this. One of easy ways is to use Idealion’s Category Enhancements plugin. Alternatively, if you want a more theme-level solution, follow the steps below. This is something I discovered while building out the image gallery pages for The Boar (links of what I came up with are at the bottom).
1. In your theme folder, create the category files for the categories you want to apply the custom template to.
- Let’s assume we want to apply it to the categories “Portrait Photography” (ID: 5) and “Nature Photography” (ID: 12).
- In this case we’d create category-5.php and category-12.php
2. In the category template files (category-5.php & category-12.php), add the following:
<?php require_once('common_template.php'); ?>
3. Create a generic category template: common_template.php
4. Then in the common_template.php, add the following:
<?php get_header(); ?> <?php echo 'Hello World!'; ?> <!-- The rest of your custom template goes here --> <?php get_footer(); ?>
5. Now, if you navigate to http://your-site.com/?cat=5 and http://your-site.com/?cat=12, you’ll notice that their look will mirror what you included in common_template.php
I should note that this approach isn’t limited to category templates; you can use this with author and tags templates as well. Technically, with this approach you could combine multiple categories and tags, as well (though if you do, be wary of category- and tag-specific functions and make use of conditional tags).
You can see an example of this in action at the links below:
- Regular category page: The Boar – The Library
- Customized category pages that share a single template: The Boar – The Gallery | The Boar – Photography | The Boar – Fine Arts
Sample files you work from. Download them, rename the extension to .php and throw them into your template folder.
- common_template.php (Note: I just filled this with code from the Kubrick theme’s archive.php file)
- category-5.php
- category-12.php
Thoughts, questions, suggestions? Leave a comment below or send me an email.
