Today I learned… how to customize the “Category” view in WordPress (Genesis framework) to show just the post titles as ordinary links in a list.
I really like the way posts of a category are displayed on DailyBlogTips. Each post gets a bullet in a simple unordered list.
By default, WordPress (and Genesis) gives you two options for displaying posts by category: either their full form one after another (do not want), or a truncated version with the post title and excerpt (also do not want).
A solution in which the titles were rendered as <a hrefs> between <li></li> tags required modifying the loop when on a Category page.
Please note that this code requires a theme built on the Genesis framework, though it should not be hard to modify the hooks to suit your framework if you know your way around a bit.
Copy the contents of functions.php into your child theme’s functions.php file.
Here’s what this is doing, in English:
When the current page is ‘Categories’ (Line 9), don’t do the usual genesis_loop (Line 13). Instead, do this custom loop (Line 14) called mjg_custom_loop.
Over in mjg_custom_loop, create a new unordered list (Line 21) and for each post (Line 22), echo its permalink and its name into a set of <li> </li> tags (Line 24).
The contents of style.css will probably need to be customized to fit your site’s design, but hopefully this is enough to get you through the hardest part which is customizing the loop on the category page.
Here is how it looks on the site:
