Categories for Pages

One of the fundemental design axioms for my site (my Theme) was that I wanted to cater for sites that had Corporate pages and Technical / Information pages, and that the Corporate pages would have a completely different look and feel. These corporate pages I actually termed site-pages, and, well given you are here, you have probably already noticed that the:

• Home
• About
• Privicy Policy
• Contact Me

pages are formated consistently, but completely different from the other pages.

I could (probably) achieved this using different templates, but I wanted this feature to be coded into the theme, not something the User had to work out for themseleves.

Coding in a Category in a Theme

The following code included in the theme set_up will enable categories for Page post-types. However this will not affect which template file is used as the template heirarchy does not search categories for page post-types.

		//Add site-page category for post-type 'page';
		if (file_exists (ABSPATH.'/wp-admin/includes/taxonomy.php')) 
		{
			require_once (ABSPATH.'/wp-admin/includes/taxonomy.php'); 
		}

		wp_insert_category(
			array(
				'cat_name' 				=> 'Site Page',
				'category_description'	=> 'This category identifies thos pages that will use the site-page template',
				'category_nicename' 	=> 'site-page',
				'taxonomy' 				=> 'category'
			)
		);

Assigning Page Template based on Category

To implement the asignment of a different page template for different categories you will need to include something along the line of the following code. What this code is doing is, for posts for which ‘is_site_page’ returns true, the template file ‘category-site-page.php’ is added into the template search heirarchy.

/**
 * Insert category-site-page template into template search heirarchy.
 */
function q5_category_site_page_template( $templates = '' ) 
{ 
    $page = get_queried_object(); 
	if (is_site_page($page))
	{
		if ( ! is_array( $templates ) && ! empty( $templates ) ) 
		{ 
			$templates = locate_template( array( "category-site-page.php", $templates ), false ); 
		} 
		elseif ( empty( $templates ) ) 
		{ 
			$templates = locate_template( "category-site-page.php", false ); 
		} 
		else 
		{ 
			$new_template = locate_template( array( "category-site-page.php" ) ); 
			if ( ! empty( $new_template ) ) 
			{ 
				array_unshift( $templates, $new_template ); 
			} 
		} 
	}
    return $templates; 
} 
add_filter( 'page_template', 'q5_category_site_page_template' );