Comments on: WordPress FAQ: How Do I Use Category Themes?

By: Frank

Frank — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 11:39:00 +0000

Hello!

I realize this is sort of an old issue, but I was wondering if there were a relatively simple tutorial for setting up a WordPress blog that allows for separate WordPress Themes for each Category featured on the blog. So far I’ve found numerous sites describing how one can alter the Category templates, but this is the first site that seems to suggest you can actually set separate complete Themes for each category. I tried my best with what was provided here, but even the basic questions of which files to edit seem a bit confusing.

Thanks for the help! (hopefully)
Frank

By: Matt Kruse

Matt Kruse — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:09:41 +0000

My code got filtered out, of course, it should be:

By: Matt Kruse

Matt Kruse — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:08:24 +0000

I’m putting up a family blog, with each person in the family having their own category. So the home page will show all posts, and each person will “have their own blog” by linking directory to their category.

I wanted to allow for different themes and styles if someone is viewing a category page specific to a certain family member.

So what I did is in the header I just put this:

Now I will have a class set on the body tag if I’m viewing a category page, and I can use plain old CSS to set rules like

body.Bob { background-color:black; }
body.Bob #wp-calendar { something-funky; }

I can completely change the layout, style, and content based only on the body’s class by changing my theme’s single stylesheet.

I haven’t fully implemented it yet, but that’s my plan. Any better ideas?

By: Banyan

Banyan — Thu, 03 May 2007 03:08:44 +0000

Nice post!

The categories always prefix with “category”.

I find we can remove it by add /. to the setting.
Options>>Permalink>>Optional>>Category base:

By: Orderer

Orderer — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:36:53 +0000

Nice post! Actually categories, and the per-author posts are perhaps the most under-utilized of wordpress’ features.

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 17:28:42 +0000

My bad, Milo. I’ve made the change.

By: Milo

Milo — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 09:57:40 +0000

This is so cool! I can’t wait to find my way in WordPress and use the techniques above. I would start with a simple change header scenario for each category. Its been a long time I want to do this. :)

Also, can you please correct? My name is Milo Riano, not Griano. :) G is my middle initial.

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:42:56 +0000

I’d probably recommend that anyone separating content out like this into different stylesheets, etc probably also take the additional step of modifying the main Loop to exclude those categories. In other words, it’s probably less effective if you don’t treat separate categories as separate pseudo-blogs – if that makes any sense through my weekend haze.

By: James Joyner

James Joyner — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:51:00 +0000

Interesting. I spun off almost all the postings for sports and pop culture to separate blogs last February, so there’s probably not much point anymore.

I’ll have to think about other applications, though. Most of my visitors either come to a specific entry item or the home page, but I do get substantial search engine referrals to the category archive pages. It may be interesting to color code or play around with different logos and such for those pages.

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:36:05 +0000

Hi James-

Good to see you. I’ve seen a couple of blogs do it where the topics are diverse and the author wanted to have, say, a different background color for a given category or, say, a slightly different layout for a miniblog category. Your blog would do quite well with either a different color or a different layout for, particularly, your sports category. At any rate, Andrew Sullivan pops to mind as someone who did slightly different things per category on his old blog.

I’m also pretty sure Mezzoblue is doing some pretty funky things with categories using them as definition for his “Collections” and styling differently per.

By: James Joyner

James Joyner — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:13:48 +0000

I experimented with this quite some time back to have different advertising content for my sports and pop culture categories buy found an easier way to do it for that purpose.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of other applications for this. Any suggestions?

By: Jonic

Jonic — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 06:54:27 +0000

Great tip Aaron…

I think it’s a little weird that, when trying to access a page, foobar.php will be used when loading a page with a slug of ‘foobar’, but the same doesn’t apply to categories.

I think WordPress could really use that. Sure, we can apply the category-x.php method you went over, but it would be great if we could use foobar.php where ‘foobar’ is the name of the category we want to look at.

For anyone that is still a little puzzled after Aaron’s great write-up on the matter; You might want to take a look at this page on the WordPress Codex concerning the template hierarchy.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

There exists a very handy diagram there that I would recommend anyone who plans on developing any WordPress themes download for private perusal at a later date.

Technosailor FTW and that :)