WP Silo - How to add unique content (category description) to each category page!?....

Not necessarily, all you have to do is attach a category to the page as well and display related posts and pages by category.

[edit]
This plugin only works If you include a category.php template file in your Wordpress theme.




I'm usually not a fan of plugins but sometimes they're useful If a theme doesn't have a built in option that you need.

This plugin will add a text editor directly on the Category page where you can create all the unique content you want. What the plugin does is replace the already existing Category-Description so it's not creating any new tables in the MySQL database, it's simply adding a better text editor on the Category Admin. page.

The plugin code is very compact & adds a lot of possibilities to the WP-Category page, so it's a pretty good plugin IMO.

I've tested this on a couple of themes, one theme the plugin didn't do anything, on the default WP Twenty Twelve theme the plugin worked perfect. So keep in mind this might not help everyone (depending on their theme). Test the plugin & see what happens.

Here's a screenshot of the plugin working on my offline test blogs Category Admin. page, looks like the regular WP text editor on the WP-Post editor page.





Keep in mind this plugin is only adding content to the Category page, it's not removing any existing duplicate Post snippets that you might already have, you'll have to modify your category.php template page If you want to remove any existing content in order to have a completely unique page. If you know HTML & basic PHP you should be able to figure out the category.php page, most likely you'll see a Loop code that displays all the Post in a single category.

Make sure to backup everything before doing any edits on the theme files.

Its a bit complicated but can be done. Im doing this on all my sites. Here we go...

1. First of all to remove the base "Category" in the category page url, you need to install this plugin called "WP No Category Base" For instance with this permalink structure /%category%/%postname% you'll get www.yourdomain.com/category/catgory-name/article-title-url ..so you can remove that base "category" from the permalink url by using this plugin.

2. If you want SEO meta titles and description for your category pages you can either use Thesis theme (They have it as an option in that theme) or else if you are using some other theme then you can use this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-seo-meta-tags/ with "All in one seo pack" plugin..because it works with that only. (Go to installation page of this plugin to download their already edited all in one seo pack plugin to save time and code editing work.)

3. Now on to the main part which is to create separate category pages for each category with its unique content. There is this fucntion in wordpress that allows to create unique category pages for each category, and for that you have to separately name them with their category ID number. For instance if you create a new category in wp-admin, mouse hover that particular category name in wp-admin >> posts >> category and you will be able to see it at the bottom where url destination is usually shown whenever we mouse hover a link. For example if you mouse-hover a category it will show you something like this...

http://www.yorudomain.com/wp-admin/e...edit&taxonomy=category&tag_ID=8&post_type=post

In this case category ID is 8

Now copy the code from category.php file and paste on to the new file and name it as category-8.php. This will be your new unique category page for your specific category with ID 8.

So just like that you can find the category ID of each unique category you make in wordpress and then create a new category file and name it as i aforementioned. category-1.php, category-2.php, category-3.php ...and so on. Just find the cat ID and make a new file for it.

Now on these cat page templates you can add your text content, images, videos with HTML markup and meta tittle, description can be managed with that plugin i mentioned in step 2.

With this setup you'll have unique text content on top of the cat page and then the usual "recent posts" in that category will continue to show at the bottom. I personally use <?php the_excerpt(); ?> instead of <?php the_content(); ?> to avoid displaying full posts on cat pages, just to avoid dup. content.

It actually works great if you constantly want to add a bit of fresh content on that particular category page through your new posts.

Oranges, try that plugin/link I posted above, then you'll only have to edit a single category.php template page.

If you know HTML, basic PHP, & have edited WP theme template files before, you'll be up & running in a few min.

Great example of ranking category page with this setup is this page http://www.sugarrae.com/affiliate-marketing/ she's ranking this category page for "Affiliate Marketing".

At the top of this page she has static unique and optimized content and then every time she posts new content related to this category it gets displayed at the bottom which adds to fresh content thing that Google thrive on.

I have had great success with this setup and specially if you have tightly closed silo and good internal links.

Ok Guys, unfortunately the plugin doesn't work with the theme. it just doesn't show any change.

So, I think I am going to try to do it manually with Oranges' method.

I tested it with 2012 theme, and as Yukon mentioned, it works perfectly. But I did notice something there - It actually shows on every page of the category (category A -page 1... category B- page 2...). That creates the duplicate content issue. How would you deal with that part though?...

By the way, is there any code that could be added to the theme to make it compatible with this plugin?...

Thanks again.

I think I figured out the problem, why the plugin doesn't work on all themes.

Wordpress has a template page hierarchy, If your theme doesn't have a category.php then WP automatically looks for the archive.php template. The plugin is only looking for the category.php so If the category.php isn't found then plugin doesn't do anything.

I went back & looked at my first theme that wouldn't work with the plugin, that first theme didn't have a category.php template page, it had the archive.php template page. I added a new category.php page & the plugin now works on the first theme.

Double check that your theme actually has a category.php template page, If it doesn't just create a new template page then go back & test the plugin again.

I copied the category.php template page from the default WP theme (Twenty Twelve), then made a few small edits.

Still looking at the code, I see a sidebar title="" in a hyperlink that is copying the entire Category article, lol.

I've attached the category.php file, unzip & make any edits you need. Your theme might not need the header/sidebar/footer inside the category file.

The important part of the code is between these two comment tags:

Satrap, see if the theme developer offers any kind of support (most of the premium paid products do, and should).

Try this new code instead of the code I posted earlier in the thread.

This code works with the category description editor plugin.

Your welcome.

It might be a good idea to check all your template files in the theme & see If any of the templates are calling the archive.php template page, that way you can make sure that you don't have any broken pages.

@ Michael_Le

Looks like you either added or deleted a <div> tag. Double check that all <div> tags have a matching closing </div> tag.

try <?php endif; ?> instead of <?php endif;>

could just be a styling thing. I could have a look at the page for you if you wanted.

Try this. It's quite hard without seeing the actual page lol

<?php
/**
* The template for displaying Category pages.
*
* Used to display archive-type pages for posts in a category.
*
* Learn more: Template Hierarchy « WordPress Codex
*
* @package WordPress
* @subpackage Twenty_Twelve
* @since Twenty Twelve 1.0
*/

get_header(); ?>

<section id="primary" class="site-content">
<div class="entry-content"><p>

<!-- Start - This displays the unique category content -->

<?php if ( is_category() ) : ?><?php if ( get_query_var('paged') < 2 ) {echo category_description();} ?><?php endif;> <!-- End - This displays the unique category content -->

</p></div><!-- #content -->
</section><!-- #primary -->

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

The screenshot looks like a broken <div> to me, the way the content text is overlapping the sidebar. PM sent.

@ Michael_Le

I copied your archive.php & made a category.php, the code that's creating the unique category page content is between these two comment tags:

Paste the attached category.php into your theme files.

This works with the custom category content plugin I posted in this thread.

Hi guys, little bit confuse with all of this plugin, category.php, archive.php and on and on...
I don't know much about coding. but i use the IF code like this... :
I use it like that... yes it's manual edit the category.php or archive.php file.. and must added one by one each category description.
I use it for a long time, but i dont test it. I dont do testing with other method and dont know if it will help with SERP like sugarraecom/affiliatemarketing get...

I think this is will help if you got error using the above method...
just confuse and try to help.. see ya

Wordpress is not really designed to build silo-style websites.

Sorry, but I can't help you but to say that perhaps you should make a static non-WP site if you plan to use a silo structure.

Never Mind, solved my issue