I am So Completely dissapointed…

  • I am searching for a single, simple functionality and the following three plugins would all work well to fit my need if it weren’t for the fact that they are all 3 broken and all 3 completely unsupported.

    1. Category Page by Pixline
    2. All Category SEO Updater by Bradley G. Smith
    3. Tui’s Category Intro For Archive by Stephen Baugh

    All I need is a plugin or other fix to allow me to add a title and some text at the top of a category archive. I’m trying to make my Category archives a bit more like pages, with actual original content on them to introduce the entire category.

    Sadly, after painstakingly searching through every plugin tagged with the word “category,” these three were the only ones that claimed to do this, although they did it in completely different ways.

    Woe is me, all three are completely BROKEN, at least in WP versions 2.7.1 and 2.8.

    The 1st and 3rd plugins above simply don’t show anything on the header as advertised, and the 2nd one (which I would prefer of the three) has the horrible habit of completely breaking all of your Tags and Category archive pages, along with deleting your other SEO settings on the blog in plugins like “All in one SEO”! Ouch!

    Worse yet, all three authors are not contactable!

    Someone PLEASE tell me I’m dreaming… I really need this functionality for a business blog I have already started putting together.

    If you know another way to do this without changing my template, I’d be very grateful. Or if you know how to pick up the ball and run with one of these three good ideas above, there is certainly a need for this functionality!

    Thanks in advance,
    Luke

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Don’t think you can get to an easy solution without changing a category template…

    In a category template this will work:

    <?php
if ( is_category() ) {
$cat = get_query_var('cat');
$category=get_category($cat);
echo '<p>Category Title/Name: '. $category->name . '</p>';  //single_cat_title() will also work for this
echo '<p>Category Description: '. $category->description . '</p>';
}
?>

    Related:
    Stepping Into Template Tags
    Stepping Into Templates
    Template Hierarchy
    Category Templates

    Please note I deleted this same subject you added to another topic.

    Hi lukep,
    Also note that for SEO purposes, I believe you could use “all in one SEO”, to change the title tags (not the titles!) of the archive pages.

    Good luck,
    Tal

    Thread Starter lukep

    (@lukep)

    Thank you very much, Michael,

    I’m starting to understand this now. I’ve read through your references and I believe the reason the plugins above didn’t work for me is that my category section isn’t in any of the normal hierarchy on my template… It is actually in the Loop’s file!

    -So these plugins simply can’t find it to change it. ??

    …Which explains perfectly why they aren’t supported anymore; the authors must not have known that templates out there exist like mine and therefore are being bombarded with ppl saying their plugin doesn’t work.

    So, can you confirm for me that this is the code I’m looking for in my template that I should edit:

    <?php if (is_category()) {
				  printf(__('Archive for the \'%s\' Category', 'experwp'), single_cat_title('', false));

    -That was found near the top of my loop.php file, after failing to find any mention of is_category in the index file. (And no category nor even archive file exists at all.)

    If that’s it, do I replace the printf line there, or just add your code above it?

    Also, I am assuming that your code calls the description field that is populated at the time of category creation… Can HTML exist in that field? I’d love to have headings and subheadings, or even pictures on these if I could.

    Thanks again for your help. It is appreciated.

    Thread Starter lukep

    (@lukep)

    Tal,

    Thanks for your help too, although I can’t find anything in all-in-1-seo for category pages nor archives. It just seems to let me add 1 description for all posts, pages, or the home page itself.

    Is there something I’m missing?

    If that’s it, do I replace the printf line there, or just add your code above it?

    If that template is the one controlling the display of your category archives, then that sounds good. Again review Template Hierarchy to get a feel for how WordPress decides what template control the display of various archives (e.g. date, category, tag, author).

    Can HTML exist in that field?

    Yes. Have you tried it?

    lukep- I checked also and the answer is that you can’t change the title tag per archive page.
    But you can change it’s format, for example:
    %date% | %blog_title%

    Good luck ??
    Tal

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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