need a plugin to display category archives as a page

There are a couple ways to do this without plugins. The easiest is just make a separate category page. Let’s say you want to have category 6 have it’s own page. All you have to do is duplicate the file archive.php and rename it to category-.php. Then you can do whatever you want to that page. Otherwise, you’re are going to need to do some coding on the page if you want to do something with a page vs. a category. The easiest way to do that is to make a template and then apply that template to the page.

If you want the loop to only show a specific category, just add this to your query_posts:

<?php query_posts('cat=5&showposts=1'); ?>

Hope that helps.

Thanks. I have made page templates before so that should be no problem and should do the trick.

I’m not sure if copying the archive.php would put a button onto the pages menu. Would that also become a page template that I would call from a page?

There are instructions on exactly how to do this here:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Pages#A_Page_of_Posts

I went with their raw example and it’s not pulling in the sidebar, but I think I can figure that out.

A nice thing about this example is that it uses is_page and elseif so you can assign different categories to different pages.

Thanks,
John Nasta

Hey, maybe somebody could give me some guidance as to why I can’t get the sidebar to show. The page template example uses this code:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

but my theme (gmusic) uses this code:

<div class="sidebar1">
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar1.php'); ?>
</div>

I thought I could just swap in the code from my theme and it would work, but it doesn’t. I am using widgets, although strangely enough the sidebar doesn’t appear to be widget-ready. If I get rid of the widgets I still get the same result (no sidebar on the category pages).

Thanks!

Correction. I am pulling up the sidebar content but it’s coming in under the page content rather than along the side. Hopefully I’ll get it figured out.

I should mention that I have figured this out, just so nobody spends any mental energy on it. I just had a add a container DIV and also change where they have ID=content to class=content, and now everything displays just fine. This gave me an idea though about using “if is_page” and “elseif” on this site to call in a customized sidebar for each page. Could be cool and it would be easy.