Finally after loads of development, bug testing and feature implementation, I am glad to release my second WordPress Plugin, WP Category Post List. What the Plugin does is, gives you a fully configurable widget to show posts filtered by categories on your sidebar, footer (widgetized area). So, how it differs from other plugins of the same family? Well, just to start here are the complete feature list…
#0: Feature:
Output of the widget
- A total of 21 options to chose from. I have some feeling that this will increase over next release.
- Fully configurable widget title, category to display (Even if parent category or sub category), ability to modify the widget output (Default HTML unordered list or your own HTML) and much more.
- Enter the maximum number of posts, and also select how they should be sorted (date, id, comment etc) and in which order.
- Add your own Title, Teaser with custom tag support. For example %cat_name% will get replaced by the Category Name.
- Add Feed link beside the title. Show image link or simple text link. It is intelligent enough to know whether you have entered image URL or simple text.
- Add a Read More button below the widget which links to the category.
- Make sticky posts which will be added above the list with special theming. This will not count to the number of posts on the actual list and will not be verified if they belong to the category or not.
- Ability to exclude posts by their ID.
- Fully compatible with WordPress default featured image. Make a feature image from the post editor and it will be shown as thumbnail. Also you can change the thumbnail size globally from the plugin’s setting page. The plugin adds the featured image support if your theme does not already.
- Ability to turn on/off the thumbnails for different posts.
- Every designing is done via CSS Classes. So change them the way you want.
- Talking about CSS, it comes with 4 cool pre-installed themes. You can either use them or code your own theme. You have the ability to enter CSS class name for the widget, and the thumbnail wrapper.
- You have total control of HTML structure of the widget. It supports tag parameter which would get replaced by the plugin generated CSS classes. Say, if you enter <p class=”%list_class%”> to the Before Link option, then %list_class% will get replaced by wp-cpl-even, wp-cpl-odd or wp-cpl depending upon your configuration.
- Ability to add alternate wp-cpl-even, wp-cpl-odd CSS class to the list. Just tick the Alternate Link CSS and you are done.
- You can choose whether you want the link to open in new window or current window.
Now, that seems complete right? Now, lets get started with the installation and setup.
#1: Installing the Plugin:
Just download the plugin from here. (WordPress plugin directory)
Upload it to your plugin directory and activate it. Alternately you can:
- Go to Admin » Plugin » Add New and search for WP Category Post List.
- Install the plugin from there and activate it.
#2: Initial Setup:
Widget with basic options
- Go to Admin » Settings » Category Posts (WP-CPL) and set your Thumbnail size and theme.
- If you have set a new thumbnail size, then I would recommend you to install the Regenerate Thumbnail plugin and regenerate the thumbnails.
- Now go to the widget are from Admin » Appearance » Widgets.
- You will notice a new widget WP Category Post List. Drag it to one of your widget area and set it up.
Widget with Advanced options
That’s it. You are done. For the Advanced Options, just hit the Toggle button.
#3: Complete Options list:
The plugins settings page
You can easily find it from the Admin » Settings » Category Posts (WP-CPL) You will see a table there with a complete list of information for every option. In case you are curious, here is a list of it here.
| Description | Parameter | Default | Example | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Description | Parameter | Default | Example | |
| Basic Options | ||||
| Title | The Title of the widget. This will be displayed over the top of each widget | It has the following options paramter. You can insert them on the title and it will get replaced by the corresponding values
|
Browse %cat_name% | Be creative and form your own |
| Teaser | A one liner shown below the widget, just above the Read More button(if present) | Offers Same options as Title | Featuring Top %widget_num%/%cat_count% of %cat_name% | |
| Category | The category you want to chose. Select one from the list | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Show Link | If ticked this will show a Read More link at the end of the widget. This will link to the category | N/A | By default this is ticked | N/A |
| Number of Posts | The total number of posts that would be shown on the widget. This excludes the number of sticky posts. | N/A | 10 | What ever you can imagine |
| Comment count | Whether you want to show comment count beside every posts. | N/A | Unticked. Not shown by default | N/A |
| Show Feed | If ticked a link will be placed before the title to the feed of the category. | N/A | Ticked. Attempts to show the feed | N/A |
| Feed Image or Text | The anchor text or image link which would be hyperlinked to the category feed | If you enter a valid image URL then the image would be shown. Else it will use the value as anchor text. | N/A | Say your Enter a image URL http://yousite.com/path/to/image.png or simply a Text [Syndicate] |
| Show Thumbnail & Thumb Class | Whether you want to show thumbnail beside every post, and if showing then the css class applied to the thumbnail | The Structure of the thumbnail is as follows
<span class="wp-thumb-overlay">
<span class="thumb_lay or userclass">
<img width="40" height="40" title="Title" alt="alt" class="attachment-wp-cpl-post-thumb wp-post-image" src="path/to/img.jpg" />
</span>
</span>
|
thumb_lay | N/A |
| Sorting | Here you have two options. Sort Order and Sort Using. You can choose from a number of available options for the Sort Using, and make it ascending or descending | Sort Using has ID, title, date, comment or random options. | Date -> Ascendng | N/A |
| Advanced Options | ||||
| List Style | How the HTML list is formed. This is basically the HTML nesting | Unordered list is the basic ul li type listing. You can select Custom Style to insert your own HTML tags before/after the list/links | HTML Unordered List | N/A |
| Widget Style | The CSS class applied to the widget | N/A | ||
| Before/After List/Link | The HTML tag before the whole Widget List | Before List supports only one parameter.%widget_class% : Gets replaced by system generated widget class and your own widget class Similarly Before Link supports one paramter %list_class% : |
|
|
| Exclude Posts | Comma Seperated values of IDs of posts to exclude | The following ID format will work12, 34,65 75,12 ,45 |
N/A | |
| Sticky Posts | Same as Exclude Posts. Only the posts will become sticky. This will not verify whether they belong to the selected category or not. They will be placed before the normal list and CSS class wp-cpl-sticky will be applied to them | |||
| Open in | Whether to open in the current tab or new tab | Basically _blank or _self will be added to the anchor tag |
Current Tab | N/A |
| Alternate List CSS | Applies Alternate Listing CSS classes to the list HTML tag. | wp-cpl-odd or wp-cpl-even CSS classes will be added accordingly | N/A | |
Quite a long list eh?
#4: Default CSS for theming:
As mentioned before, it comes pre-installed with 4 different themes. However, you can add your own theme. For your ease, here is the default CSS class lists
/** Basic theme structure */
/** The main widget */
.wp-cpl-widget {
}
/** The li */
.wp-cpl-widget li {
}
/** The thumb */
.wp-cpl-widget li span.wp-thumb-overlay {
}
/** The teaser */
.wp-cpl-teaser {
}
/** The read more */
.wp-cpl-read-more {
}
/** The comment */
.wp-cpl-comment {
}
#5: Few Tips:
#5.1: To style widgets differently:
- Apply different CSS class to different widgets.
- Use that class to override the CSS using the template mentioned above.
#5.2: Changing the post thumbnail size:
- Install and run Regenerate Thumbnails plugin by viper007.
- Use it just after setting your thumbnail size and after changing the size to a new value.
#6: Known issue:
The only issue I know is it does not show post counts to the parent category from the child category. I am working on a solution for this. If you know a method please let me know.
And that was all. I hope this plugin will serve you good. Please give your feedback and in case of any error/bug let me know. I will find a workaround for that!
Swashata has written
Hey there! This is the place where I write about the technologies I understand. Personally I'm a geek and professionally Web Developer. You can also check my other site to get to know about my other hobbies ;)
Swashata has another home at http://www.swashata.com/
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- Regenerate Thumbnail size for attachment images wordpress | InTechgrity - [...] Plugin Reviewd by iTgSo, we have released our second plugin WP Category Post Lists and I hope it ...
- Il Blog di Webem-lab » Blog Archive » Elencare i post di una specifica Categoria con Wordpress - [...] WP Category Post Widget, è un plugin for WordPress per elencare i post di una specifica categoria. [...]
- Wordpress.org vs .com | IanTunnicliffePhotography - [...] Fluency Admin, Link Library, Now Reading Reloaded, Organize Series, WP-Copyright-Protection and WP Category Post List Widget. One I can’t seem ...
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- Get total post count from category & children in WordPress | InTechgrity - [...] faced this problem, while developing the 2nd version of the WP-CPL plugin. So I came up with a custom ...
This plugin has saved me a tonne of work.. but I need it to have pagination! Anyway to make that happen?
Choose the number of posts to show and then it creates & displays pagination to index all of them in that category? pretty please?
h
I will keep that in mind for the next release
Awesome! When the site using it is live (next week or two hopefully) I’ll post up a link. Using it in a sneaky way!
Thanks so much for this!
http://www.cericushen.com/
Category based, fake galleries.
The user creates a post, chooses the category, inserts their image and sets a featured thumbnail.
The posts are displayed as thumbnails in the sidebar, using the plugin, and link to the relevant post. Perfection!
Hilary, thanks for sharing. I’m about to redo my site and need a gallery to show my portfolio. LOVE this solution!
Hello, great plugin!
I’m interested to know if I could implant the script manually instead of using the widget? Also, is there a way I can alter it to list horizontally?
Thank you for your time and again, awesome plugin.
For horizontal you can edit the CSS. Currently there is not option to put this script manually except of using a widget. On future release, I will come up with a shortcode feature using which you can use this inside posts/pages etc.
I’m having a wicked hard time getting the CSS to style this list. I’ve opted to not use the default settings but still can’t add additional spacing between the li.
None of the CSS I’m setting is “taking”. Have you had any luck editing your CSS?
How do I get it to show the post date after the post title?
thx for a great plug-in
lee
Sorry this is currently not supported. But thanks for the idea. It will be implemented on the next release
Great plugin. Any idea when this will be released?
Thank you
Also, can I exclude posts from sub-categories?
Yes you can. You just need to know the ID of the posts
No I meant actually specify to not include sub-categories. The sub-category will contain hundreds of posts, its not really practical to list them individually ….
Lee Hodgson recently posted..Geo Places – your city directory built in WordPress
awesome plugin!
is there a way to exclude the current post?
or is the exclusion just working with id’s?
regards
No friend, exclusion just works with ids
Is there a way to list all the categories?
The information I want to display in the widget is:
Category 1
Category 2
Category 3
Post 1 with thumbnail
Post 2 “” “”
Category 4
And the info now displayed is:
Category 1 (as the title of the widget)
Post 1 with thumbnail
Post 2 “” “”
Hi,
great work on the plugin!!!
I wonder if I can also use the original size of my thumbnails to display. Eg. my thumbnails are eg 300×120 but when generating thumbnails with the plugin, they are always eg 300×300. Is there a change to preserve the original image proportion instead of having same width and height.
Thanks
Markus
hi,
I want to show a list of posts that are in the same category as the one that is being read by the reader, but i dont want to show the list of posts when other links are clicked – such as when you are browsing the posts in a certain category.. any idea how i can do that?
Cheerz
Yes, i need that to. I want to show in every category a list of posts in that certain category.
I require the same functionality.
IF the widget class that the user sets encompasses the TITLE and all content of each WP Category Post List widget then this could be executed within styles. But as I understand it now, the class only appends to the list (or custom HTML) after the the TITLE (which I find very limiting).
If someone has a solution, or idea, I am all ears.
Why dont you use related post widget plugin?
This plugin has saved me a tonne of work.. but I need it to have pagination! Anyway to make that happen?
- How to insert code to theme ..
I do not want to use Widget .
thanks
I love the plugin, there’s one thing I was wondering if it could do, if not would it be easy to get it to do?
I need it to display the excerpt of the posts. Currently I have the thumbnail set to 125px and all that shows next to the image is the title. It would be nice to have a small bit of the post show up under the title.
Thanks again … Scott
Scott Prock recently posted..Tron Glow Hoodie
Scott’s request is exactly what I was looking for. Displaying just the title is not sufficient, it cries out for an excerpt.
Hi,
The thumbnails aren’t showing up, I haven’t run the regenerate thumbnails plugin because I don’t want the thumbnails used around the site to change size, but from what i’ve been reading not running this shouldn’t cause them to not show up at all?
Thanks
Kate
Kate recently posted..Pretty things- Dark crystal
This looks fantastic! When do you expect the next version to be ready with the shortcode for pages/posts?
Great plugin, would it be possible to have a migration to display WP category posts lists in a post or page?
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Is there a way to change the font and size of the words?
You can do it with CSS. Read the documentation
Great plug in! I am trying to insert an arrow image with a permalink to the post, but bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’) breaks in this plug in. It just prints out the path as text on the page and then the image src reads so you cannot see the image.
This is the line of code I inserted in line 217:
$post_output .= ‘a href=”‘ . get_permalink($post->ID) . ‘” title=”‘ . __(‘Permalink to: ‘, ‘wp-cat-list-itg’) . $post->post_title . ‘” target=”‘ . ((false == $instance['open_in'])? ‘_blank’ : ‘_self’) . ‘”>’;
$post_output .= 'a href="' . get_permalink($post->ID) . '" title="' . __('Permalink to: ', 'wp-cat-list-itg') . $post->post_title . '" target="' . ((false == $instance['open_in'])? '_blank' : '_self') . '">';Great plug in! I am trying to insert an arrow image with a permalink to the post, but bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’) breaks in this plug in. It just prints out the path as text on the page and then the image src reads so you cannot see the image.
This is the line of code I inserted in line 217:
$post_output .= 'a href="' . get_permalink($post->ID) . '" title="' . __('Permalink to: ', 'wp-cat-list-itg') . $post->post_title . '" target="' . ((false == $instance['open_in'])? '_blank' : '_self') . '">';also, is there a way to include the excerpt section of an entry in this list?
I figured it out.
i’m also trying to include exerpt with this plugin. How did u manage to do this?
thanx
Rich, How did you code the excerpt section in?
can u share the solution to include EXCERPT in the list?
I would also like to know how you modified the plugin to display excerpts following the title.
Pieter Hartsook recently posted..The Learning Curve
Hello gentlemen,
I’m also interested in trying to include the excerpt below the title.
Can you explain how this is done?
Thanks in advance!
Anybody found solution? :/
Hi Rich, I would love to know how you got excerpts to work with this plugin. It’s driving me nuts. Thanks!
Rich,
You appear to be the only person on the planet with this knowledge. Is there any way that we can convince you to share it with us?
It looks like it would be as easy as adding ” . get_the_excerpt($post->ID)” at the end of the “Add up the actual permalink and post title” section, but that doesn’t seem to work.
Can i add link to the category , through TITLE
yes i want to add link to title of widget to got to the category page when clicked .
PLease , the only thing missing in the plugin
CAN YOU GUIDE ???? PLS
Just thank you.
Emanuel recently posted..Romania Inchis pentru inventar
Hi there,
Great plugin!
Is there any way of showing the excerpt of the post?
Hi,
I love this plugin, but I’m having trouble with the styling (I’m not a coder!) I’d like to include the post date and author with the post title. Using Firebug I can make it look (almost) how I’d like it to, but I have no idea how to actually style it this way. Is it possible?
Post Name by Author on Date
Great plugin!
Tim
Hi Swashata,
thank you very much for this great plugin! It does a great job on my website.
I found just one little bug: The automatic picture/text detection for the RSS feed does not seem to work. Every picture URL I enter is being displayed as text. I tried both .png and .jpeg files, 20x20px in size. Is there a way to “tell” the plugin that it has to interpret the input as a picture?
Best regards from Germany!
zeitweise
Hi,
is there a way to generate a numbered list? I want to create a top 10 widget.
thanks!!
Sounds like a good option for the v2
Btw, you can do this now as well.
From the advanced option, select list style to custom.
Then put <ol> and </ol> before and after widget.
Also put <li> and </li> before and after link.
Thx a lot for this very useful plugin Swashata, I’m just wondering how to set the category link on the TITLE (make widget title link), not only with the Read More link … I tried to modify wp-category-post-list.php, but your code is too complex for me
THx for any help
I will incorporate this feature on the next release
for the moment I managed to write %cat_name% in the specific input field, it’s not perfect because I had to delete “strip_tags” when code is sanitized line 323 “$instance['title']= strip_tags($title);”, and the link is not dynamic, but it works for my purpose ….
THX to include this feature on the next release so ^^
This is a nice plugin. I’m trying to pull in custom fields in my list of posts. So instead of The title, thumbnail, and excerpt, it shows, title, thumbnail, SRN (custom field), and price (custom field).
That is not directly possible. Infact it is not the primary objective of this plugin to do such things. You may hire us to develop something like that though
I’ve done this myself in the category archive, it was extremely simple, I just need it on the home page now, grrr. Thanks for your response!
Cool. I am working on the next version of the plugin with short tag support.
I have php5 installed, but it gave me an error msg that I can’t install without php5?
Any workaround if this is an error?
This is beautiful, but I would want it to work on custom post types also. Is this a possible future feature?
Cindi recently posted..Mala Jones- Pumpkin with Crow
Great plugin! I’m looking for this feature too as I’m using custom post types in my wordpress site.
This is a great plugin, been looking for this some time.
So far i has gotten most of the CSS styling I wanted out of the way. The problem I’m having is figuring out how to add the date and excerpt underneath each of the post titles.
I’m pretty new to coding, so if someone can lead me in the right direction it would be appreciated. Is there a line of code that I need to add to one of the plugin’s php folders.
thanks
csc
Hello swashata thank u for this amazing plugin, ur site is very cool too. I am trying your plugin and I have an issue, the div of the posts are not matching my sidebar, if you have time please take a look at this screentshot at:http://bandas.headbangerspanama.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Screenshot.png or access my test site directly at: http://bandas.headbangerspanama.com
I as looking at the css files but I cant find anything to fix this, any help will be appreciate it. Saludos!
I can’t get Feed Image to work. I can if I point to a PNG not on my wordpress blog… ergh.
here’s the image i’m trying to use:
http://eatdrinkbemellow.insanebrideguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/vegetable_black.png
it exists – its a png – but the plugin interprets it as text.
help!
How can I get the thumbnails to use author avatars instead of post images? Is this possible?
Not being a coder, I really appreciate the plugin. It solved a real need for me on a new website.
I’ve been able to follow the documentation and changed some of the css formatting, but what I’m having trouble with is the font color of the links.
I can set the overall font color for the main widget in wp-cat-list-theme.css under the Main Widget classes (.wp-cpl-widget, .wp-cpl-widget * ), but I cannot find where or how to override that for the odd & even classes.
I have tried modifying the (color: ) and (background: ) properties of (.wp-cpl-widget li.wp-cpl-even ) and (.wp-cpl-widget li.wp-cpl-odd ) in wp-cat-list-light.css. While the (background: ) property will affect the color, the (color: ) property does not have any effect.
Where can I individually modify the font color of the odd and even fonts?
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is it possible to have the title link to it’s respective category just like how ‘read more’ does it? any suggestions how, please? thanks
Thank you so much for this plug-in!
Can you make one for Pages? I can’t seem to find anything compatible.
Thanks again
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Hello!
Very nice plugin. However I miss so much option to include excerpts of the post next to the thumbnail. Any chance to do it with your plugin?
Thank you
First of all ty for this awesome plugin, it saved me lots of work.
I’m trying to figure out how can I insert an excerpt of the each post right after it’s tittle, I tried it using the wp functions the_excerpt and get_the_excerpt in some different ways and none seems to work, if you or some user (seems many of them have tried to make this) could give me some tips how to make it I would be glad.
Thanks in advance,
João Mendes
notice that there is a need to have PHP5 … I can’t use the plugin?
Hello, back here to report a problem with the Thumbnail which doesn’t seem to appear in WordPress 3.1.1.
I clicked the checkbox option in the Widget panel but nothing changes, is there anything else to do ?
The thumbnails are well created, but the HTML code is not included with the post Title …
Swashata, let us know if you are still supporting this plugin or not, so that we don’t bother you anymore ^^
Thx for your work anyway
Ok just in case someone has the same problem, this option is only supported if you have selected a Featured Image while editing a post.
Useless in my case because I can’t edit all my posts to insert a Featured Image, plus the function is already used to display 4 of them in the home …
Too bad it’s not possible to call the little thumbnail (50x50px by default) without the Featured Image function then.
Thanks for the great plugin, it’s really awesome !
I just wanted to submit a bug (tied to the way WordPress works): when I ask the plugin to show the additional number of posts in the given category, it gives me the total number -1 (the way WP counts articles, AFAIK). I feel it starts counting at zero, like in C, so the real number would need to be increased by 1.
I would also like to submit a request: would it be possible, first to allow the customization the “read more” string link so that it could be translated, and also to custom the link target as well, so that, for instance, we may instead link to a page instead of an automatically-generated archive of the given category?
Thanks!
I think I have the same question for “read more”. If it is possible to link to a page instead of the assigned category.
Would be helpful. Thank you!
Right now no!
Hello,
I also need to link “read more” button with a page for example instead of the category.
And how is possible to change the appearance of the boxes? For example not to have border around?
Is there a way to link 2 categories or more in the same widget? The same with excluding the posts but to have an option too to have all categories and exclude the ones that we do not want to appear in the widget.
In case that there is another plugin that do that I would appreciate an answer.
Thank you very much.
You need to know CSS for changing the appearance! And currently there is no way to link 2 categories in the same widget!
Hello,
First of all thank you for the plugin. My only question is if it is possible to display the list of posts without boxes, just as a simple list. I do noy know how to write my own css, so I would appreciate if yoy can explain very simple for me.
Thank you very much.
Hi, nice plugin! I’d love to put a list of my posts on a page (not in a widget). Have you developed a short code for that yet? That would be great! Thanks!
Is there a way to get the authirs name and/or category in the link?
I’m trying to deactivate the plug in to diagnose a problem and I keep getting this message regarding this plug in:
Warning: extract() [function.extract]: First argument should be an array in /home/newlif17/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-category-posts-list/includes/wp-cpl-settings.php on line 620
Warning: extract() [function.extract]: First argument should be an array in /home/newlif17/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-category-posts-list/includes/wp-cpl-settings.php on line 653
What do I do to put the correct coding in the plug in to allow me to effectively de-activate it?
Hi there,
Great widget. However, on my site it’s not working properly. It’s not showing thumbnails.
Can you help me out? It would be great if I could get it to work.
im facing the same problem, i just cant get the thumbnail working, take a look at the page.
Hello
This is a great plugin but I want to change the size of the thumbnails to be rectangular (150 x 50).
I can see in the notes there is an option ‘Show Thumbnail and Thumbnail Class’ but I am totally bemused on how to edit this. What file should I be editing to amend the code?
Is there any way to have the “author name” displayed?
In the “Posts by Tag” widget there is a check box for author name.
Thanks
Guys, I want to add the publishing date to the widget on this site:
http://disco.coggancreative.com/
send me the code, ill buy you some beer! Please?
The plug in works great, except for some reason the thumbnails don’t show up in IE 8.
Since other images broke for the same reason, I suspect that it’s because IE 8 doesn’t like the way it’s calling up the path to the thumbnails.
I am on a temporary URL right now, and I had another image issue where IE8 does not like this URL:
/wp-content/uploads/bg/side_primary_right.png
but it likes this URL:
/~vanalsty/wp-content/uploads/bg/side_primary_left.png
So, I suspect this might be the problem but don’t know how to change it.
Thank you.