Can you put categories on select pages and not all of them

There are a lot of ways this could be done, but the easiest would be to use widgetized areas (aka sidebars).

A lot of modern themes come with often times a ridiculous number of widgetized areas. Depending on the client I am working for I will make as many widgetized areas as necessary. But by default I use the following strategy as my starting point…

• Home sidebar
• Blog sidebar
• Pages sidebar
• 3-4 Footer areas

Then I add new areas as needed. But the logic here is that if you are running a website with a blog and not just a blog, probably you are going to want different sidebar content for site pages than in your blog. And moreover most professional sites have a fully custom home page layout so that is definitely going to need it’s own. But in many cases you will have whole sections, individual pages/categories/templates that you want to have it’s own sidebar widget areas.

I use something like this in my sidebar.php to output the above examples…

if ( is_front_page() )
    ...dynamic sidebar code here for 'home' sidebar...
else if ( is_page()  )
    ...dynamic sidebar code here for 'page' sidebar...
else
    ...dynamic sidebar code here for 'blog/other' sidebar...

This is the code from TwentyTen to add a new widgetized area…

register_sidebar( array(
		'name' => __( 'Primary Widget Area', 'twentyten' ),
		'id' => 'primary-widget-area',
		'description' => __( 'The primary widget area', 'twentyten' ),
		'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget-container %2$s">',
		'after_widget' => '</li>',
		'before_title' => '<h3 class="widget-title">',
		'after_title' => '</h3>',
	) );

Change 'Primary Widget Area', 'primary-widget-area', and 'The primary widget area' to the new name of the widget area, the id of the widget area (also used to output it – see below), and the text that will appear in the widget box in the admin to describe what/where that widget area is for.

The simplest way to output the dynamic sidebar is…

if ( ! dynamic_sidebar( 'id-you-entered-for-new-area' ) ) { }

However you are also going to need to edit your sidebar with some conditions to determine which sidebar should be showing (see my example above). OR you can make a page template and a new sidebar template (e.g. special-pages1.php and sidebar-special-pages1.php or whatever) and include the “special pages” sidebar explicitly in the “special pages” template.

But I’m not sure there is a quick and easy answer if you are not already comfortable with php other than review these codex articles and experimenting/learning…

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/register_sidebar
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/dynamic_sidebar
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Stepping_Into_Templates
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Templates
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Theme_Development

Everything you need to do this (and more) are in those links.

This is the sort of thing that I have seen plugins for that seem unnecessary when, with a little bit of html/css/php and the codex, it really is only a few lines of code in the right place.

I hope this helps. Find your day well.

Hey what exactly you want to do? You wanted to put list of categories in sidebar of one or two pages?
UPDATE :
Try to find such code in your themes sidebar.php

<div class="widget widget_categories">
			<h3>Categories</h3>
			<ul>
			     <?php wp_list_categories(); ?>
			</ul>
	</div>

Above code will display a list of categories in sidebar. So you have to add a conditional statement so that the code will execute only in particular pages.

Include above code bewteen this :

if ( is_home(array(42,2,4))) {
        // put the code which shows the list of categorie here
    }

( 42,2,4 are page-ID’s on which you want to show list of categories.)

Thats it, it will show the list of categories only on three pages.

– How to find page ID ?