The Category Page plugin usage had been quite difficult for many users, mostly because I did not wrote any kind of decent documentation. To lighten up a bit this issue I’m writing this howto, in order to explain better both the inner logic and the usage of this plugin.

What’s this plugin purpose?

Category Page let you create connections between pages and categories inside WordPress, and allow you to use a page content as a ‘header’ for your category archives, so to have some intro text when your users browse that archive. In order to achieve this, you need to:

1. create a page with the future header text
2. create a connection between your page and your category
3. make your theme show the header text

The first step is really easy. You’ll need to go to Write » Page and create a page with your favourite content. In the same editing page you’ll find a box on the right side (WordPress 2.3) or at the bottom of the same page (WordPress 2.5). The box looks like that:

You can check in this box which category (or categories) will be connected to the page you’re editing. You can change this choice later in the same box, as well as under the manage panel, located under Manage » Category Pages.

Here you can manage every connection and create some new one. Clicking on the category name you’ll be redirect to the category archive (to check if everything is working), while clicking on the page name you can edit the page.

How can I setup my theme?

Category Page needs a little theme tweaking in order to work. You’ll need to change your default category archive header with our function. Unfortunately this kind of change can’t be done automagically, and the way to proceed may be completely different in your theme. Ask your regular theme supplier for help.

This example refers to the default theme, Kubrick.

1) Open archive.php and find lines #8-9:

2) Change them into:

3) Save and check your category archive. You’ll probably see something like this:

To lighten up your work, we are making ready some popular themes to support Category Page out of the box; we are also trying to contact some theme author to make their themes support Category Page without tweaking. We have actually made ready two themes:

• InSense theme, by BloggingPro
• Kubrick theme, by Michael Heilemann
• Sandbox (pixlined) (our version of Sandbox theme)

Some more theme will be released soon, alongside another howto on styling Category Page. If you find we need to support a given theme, please let us know.

I thought this plugin worked in the opposite way..

This plugin (and my poor documentation) made many people think it working the opposite way it works, and they expected it to let them include a categorized list of posts into their posts/pages. With the 2.5 release I’ve implemented an experimental quicktag, [ catlist ].

You need to know the category ID (in our example will be #23, short news) and write this in your post (without spaces inside the brackets): [ catlist=23 ]. This will produce something like this:

[catlist=23]

In the plugin settings page you can define how many post to list and an optional title. Please note this quicktag is experimental, and its syntax is likely due to changes in the next version. That’s because the best hidden secred of WordPress 2.5 is a brand new shortcode API .

I hope you’ll find both this howto and the plugin useful. If you need help, please share your doubts on the support forum.

By the way, if you find this plugin useful, please support its open source development, either via a Paypal donation, or by having a look at our Amazon wishlist.
Thank you!