Query-based Template Files

[Crumina team]

WordPress can load different Templates for different query types. There are two ways to do this: as part of the built-in Template Hierarchy, and through the use of Conditional Tags within The Loop of a template file.

[Crumina team]

To use the Template Hierarchy, you basically need to provide special-purpose Template files, which will automatically be used to override index.php. For instance, if your Theme provides a template called category.php and a category is being queried, category.php will be loaded instead of index.php. If category.php is not present, index.php is used as usual.

[Crumina team]

You can get even more specific in the Template Hierarchy by providing a file called, for instance, category-6.php — this file will be used rather than category.php when generating the page for the category whose ID number is 6. (You can find category ID numbers in Manage > Categories if you are logged in as the site administrator in WordPress version 2.3 and below. In WordPress 2.5 the ID column was removed from the Admin panels. You can locate the category id by clicking ‘Edit Category’ and looking on the URL address bar for the cat_ID value. It will look ‘…categories.php?action=edit&cat_ID=3’ where ‘3’ is the category id). For a more detailed look at how this process works, see Category Templates.

[Crumina team]

If your Theme needs to have even more control over which Template files are used than what is provided in the Template Hierarchy, you can use Conditional Tags. The Conditional Tag basically checks to see if some particular condition is true, within the WordPress Loop, and then you can load a particular template, or put some particular text on the screen, based on that condition.

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