bavatuesdays

One of the things we have been experimenting with here at UMW is creating custom categories for a WordPress installation that will allow us to track students and/or groups quickly and easily in the sidebar. The NIAHD Journals gave me the idea for this hack, and while its not the prettiest hack you’ll ever see, it does help dramatically with the logic of categorizing content and aiding both instructors and visitors in their attempt to navigate the blog effectively. This tutorial is for the K2 theme in particular - although the process should be roughly equivalent for other themes.

“Why don’t I just manage the Categories using the parent-child logic Wordpress affords and abandon this madness?” you ask incredulously. Well, hot shot, because while you can have groups and students listed under the Categories header in the sidebar, this option does not necessarily allow you to nest the student links within the group links, nor separate out the two. This hack offers a way to have students and groups as two separate sidebar categories that are quite logically and conveniently nested within the categories menu of the backend in the write tab (a statement that will become clearer I promise). All of which makes it a win win for everybody. So, if you’re done with the interruptions, I’ll proceed.

Additionally, part of this tutorial also allows you to reformat the archive pages that the category links in the sidebar take you to by default. This element of the tutorial may prove useful for anyone wanting the linked archive posts from the sidebar to look consistent with the rest of the blog.

Note: I have not yet explored how this will impact the feed logic by category - particularly since I am effectively creating two distinct category calls in the sidebar that allow me to effectively organize and separate out student content from group, while simultaneously keeping them integrated -how paradoxically cool!!!

Creating separate categories for students and groups in the sidebar of K2 for WordPress.

Let’s open up the sidebar.php file in the Presentation –> Theme Editor tab and get to work.

Copy the following code in the sidbar:

<div class="sb-categories">
<h2><?php _e(’Categories’,'k2_domain’); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php list_cats(0, ”, ‘name’, ‘asc’, ”, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0,”,”,”,”,”) ?>
</ul>
</div>

And place it the sidebar.php file anywhere above this code. Once you have done this change the following line to reflect the new category you want displayed on your sidebar. For example, I will change the word ‘Categories’ below to ‘Students’.

<h2><?php _e('Categories','k2_domain'); ?></h2> change to <h2><?php _e('Students','k2_domain'); ?></h2>

Now I will copy this same code as in step 1 in the sidebar once again and title this category ‘Groups’

<h2><?php _e('Groups','k2_domain'); ?></h2>

Having completed this it might be a good idea to create the students and groups through the manage categories tab in the backend of your blog. To make this process a bit simpler and more logical for the users you can have the students names nested within their particular groups (this is irrelevant if you are not using groups). See illustrations below:

As you can see from the screenshots above, each category has a corresponding ID number associated with it. Record all the unique IDs for the group names as well as all the numbers for each student (separating these numbers will prove useful).

Return to the theme editor subtab (within the Presentation parent tab) and select sidebar.php. Find the two categories (’Student’ and ‘Groups’) that you included in the sidebar.php in the steps above.

Now, you will want to exclude the appropriate entries from each category. For example, I will exclude the group categories with the unique IDs 2 through 7 from the ‘Student’ category. Alternatively, I will exclude the student categories with the unique IDs 8 through 30 from the groups category. (FYI, I wil be excluding the unique ID 1 from both categories for this is the default category uncategorized -or whatever you change it to). It should look something like the following:

<div class="sb-categories"><h2><?php _e('Groups'); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php list_cats(0, ”, ‘name’, ‘asc’, ”, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0,”,”,”,”,’1,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30′) ?>
</ul>
</div>

<div class=”sb-categories”><h2><?php _e(’Students’); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php list_cats(0, ”, ‘name’, ‘asc’, ”, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0,”,”,”,”,’1,2,3,4,5,6,7′) ?>
</ul>
</div>

Ok, now you should have the categories in place. Everytime a student posts, they should check both their name and the their group in the categories menu when writing a post or page.

If the student author check the appropriate boxes, you should see the categories in the sidebar as shown below.

The only thing left to fix is the way the look of the page containing either the group blog posts or the student’s blog posts. Sidebar category links in K2 always revert to an archived page which looks like the following:

To get rid of the text “Archive Page for …’ and to make the entire post display, rather than an excerpt, we are going to have to edit theloop.php. Ahh, the infernal loop.

To modify the archive page title for categories, find the following code:
printf(__('Archive for the \'%s\' Category','k2_domain'),

and change it to the following

printf(__('%s','k2_domain'),

To make the entire post display edit the following code

<div class="entry-content">
<?php if (is_archive() or is_search() or (function_exists(’is_tag’) and is_tag())) {
the_excerpt();
} else {
the_content(__(’Continue reading’,'k2_domain’) . ” ‘” . the_title(”, ”, false) . “‘”);
} ?>

<?php link_pages(’<p>‘.__(’Pages:’,'k2_domain’).’ ‘, ‘</p>’, ‘number’); ?>
</div>

and replace it with this:

<div class="entry-content">
<div class=”entry-content”>
<?php the_content(__(’Continue reading’,'k2_domain’) . ” ‘” . the_title(”, ”, false) . “‘”); ?>

<?php link_pages(’<p>‘.__(’Pages:’,'k2_domain’).’ ‘, ‘</p>’, ‘number’); ?>
</div>

Finally, you can get rid of any extraneous text about the archive in the sidebar.php by searching out the text and commenting it out (/*this is commented out*/).

And, viola, you are ready for a single-class multi bogging solution.