Do you want to display posts from a specific category on a custom page template? Using a page template, you can use your own HTML to display the post listing. In this article, we study how to display posts from a specific category on a custom page template.

In WordPress, you can categorize the posts. This feature is useful to find out all posts that come under a specific category. When the user clicks on one of the categories they will see posts assigned to that specific category. WordPress uses the following template files for rendering posts of a category.

• category-slug.php
• category-ID.php
• category.php
• archive.php
• index.php

To display posts as per category, WordPress searches for template files in the above order. Whichever template file is found first, code from that file is executed to display posts of a category.

It’s all about the default WordPress template system. But, what if someone wants to use a custom page template to list the posts of a specific category?

We can achieve it by writing some pieces of code. Let’s go through the steps below to accomplish this task.

Create Page Template in WordPress

We want to display posts by category on a page. So, create a file template-category.php in your active theme’s directory and add the below comment at the top of the file.

template-category.php

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Category Custom Page
 */
 

Adding this comment tells WordPress to use this template globally on any page to which this template is assigned.

Next, go to your WordPress dashboard, and create the page where you want to display posts. Assign the above template to this newly created page.

There is another way to assign a template file to your WordPress page. In that case, you have to create a file in your theme in the format of page-{slug}.php. Let’s say the slug of your page is category-list then your file name would be page-category-list.php. After this, the code from this file is used for your page.

Display Posts from Specific Category on a WordPress Page

You have created and assigned your template to the WordPress page. Now, let’s write a code that fetches posts attached to a category.

I will use WP_Query class to fetch the posts. For instance, I assume you have a category called ‘WordPress’ and you want to display posts attached to this category.

Write the code below to get a list of posts that came under the ‘WordPress’ category.

$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'post',
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'category_name' => 'wordpress',
    'posts_per_page' => 5,
);
$arr_posts = new WP_Query( $args );
 
if ( $arr_posts->have_posts() ) :
 
    while ( $arr_posts->have_posts() ) :
        $arr_posts->the_post();
        ?>
        <article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>
            <?php
            if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) :
                the_post_thumbnail();
            endif;
            ?>
            <header class="entry-header">
                <h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
            </header>
            <div class="entry-content">
                <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
                <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Read More</a>
            </div>
        </article>
        <?php
    endwhile;
    wp_reset_postdata();
endif;

Here, I used the 'category_name' => 'wordpress'. The ‘wordpress’ is the slug of a category. Adjust this slug as per your requirement.

The user can also pass the category id instead of the name of a category. In that case, you should use the key as ‘cat’ in place of ‘category_name’ and pass the id of a category.

$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'post',
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'cat' => '4', //you can pass comma-separated ids here
    'posts_per_page' => 5,
);

The value for posts_per_page is the number of posts to fetch. Pass the -1 if you want to fetch all posts. Go through the documentation to understand more about the parameters.

Next, using WordPress Loop we go through each post and display it one by one.

Note: Though I am referring to a custom page template, you can use this code anywhere on your WordPress website to display category posts.

Get Posts from Custom Taxonomy

You may be working with a custom post type and wish to display the posts from a custom taxonomy. It can be done easily using the tax_query. For that, you just need to change arguments in the previous array as follows:

$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'CUSTOM_POST_TYPE_NAME',
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'posts_per_page' => 5,
    'tax_query' => array(
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'TAXONOMY_NAME',
            'field'    => 'slug',
            'terms'    => array( 'TERM_SLUG' ),
            'operator' => 'IN'
        ),
    ),
);
 
$arr_posts = new WP_Query( $args );

No need to change the other part of the code. The above arguments will fetch the posts from a given taxonomy.

Pagination

The code I have written only fetches limited posts from the category. Although you can get any number of posts by passing a number to ‘posts_per_page’, we usually display limited posts per page and then use pagination to get the next and previous set of posts.

In order to integrate the pagination, install and activate the WP-PageNavi plugin. This plugin provides a method wp_pagenavi() that generates pagination links like the below screenshot. These links will be used to see the next or previous posts.

To add these pagination links to your WordPress page, you have to modify your code. First, you need to pass paged parameter and then use the function wp_pagenavi().

You will get the value for paged key as follows:

$paged = (get_query_var( 'paged' )) ? get_query_var( 'paged' ) : 1;

That being said our final code will be as follows.

template-category.php

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Category Custom Page
 */
 
get_header(); ?>
 
<div id="primary" class="content-area">
    <main id="main" class="site-main" role="main">
 
    <?php
    $paged = (get_query_var( 'paged' )) ? get_query_var( 'paged' ) : 1;
    $args = array(
        'post_type' => 'post',
        'post_status' => 'publish',
        'category_name' => 'wordpress',
        'posts_per_page' => 5,
        'paged' => $paged,
    );
    $arr_posts = new WP_Query( $args );
 
    if ( $arr_posts->have_posts() ) :
 
        while ( $arr_posts->have_posts() ) :
            $arr_posts->the_post();
            ?>
            <article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>
                <?php
                if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) :
                    the_post_thumbnail();
                endif;
                ?>
                <header class="entry-header">
                    <h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
                </header>
                <div class="entry-content">
                    <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
                    <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Read More</a>
                </div>
            </article>
            <?php
        endwhile;
        wp_pagenavi(
            array(
                'query' => $arr_posts,
            )
        );
        wp_reset_postdata();
    endif;
    ?>
 
    </main><!-- .site-main -->
</div><!-- .content-area -->
 
<?php get_footer(); ?>

That’s it! I have created a basic page for the post listing. You can create a nicely crafted page for your post listing by applying some CSS to it.

I hope you understand how to display posts from a specific category on a WordPress page. Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comment section below.

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