On Thanksgiving day, while waiting for the turkey to finish cooking I did some searching on the web. I was looking for a solution to make better use of the the categories in the wordpress Thesis theme.
While most people using Thesis will no doubt simply check the box that to not have the page indexed by the robots it kind of deletes the purpose of having those pages anyway.
During that search I ran across an article written by Rae Hoffman at Sugarrae.com. She has done a fantastic job in explaining what needs to be done in-order to make better use of the category pages.
This is something that I’ve already done in one of my drupal sites and was much easer to do than it was in wordpress.
Ok so what am I talking about here making the categories more robust and giving both the search engines and site visitors just a page with that starts off with:
FROM THE CATEGORY ARCHIVES:
By using hooks we can add relevant text to the top of the archives pages making them both search engine and visitor friendly.
In looking at the code and some of the example sites I did see one thing which I also found as a challenge in Drupal. That challenge is in the pagination of Drupal As well as WordPress.
Here is the code that Rae provided and I’d recommend you read her entire page “Thesis Tutorial – Creating Custom Categories”
In the code there is the statement:
if(is_category('apples')) {
Which does exactly what it is supposed to, but when pagination occurs we end up with the same message at the top of the category page again.
To the search engines it appears as duplicate content and might and I do say might appear to our visitors that they are still on the same page.
What I did was to add just a few items to the code:
if (is_category(‘apples’) && !is_home() && !is_paged()) {
This now gives us the text we want on the main category page and subsequent pages will display 2, 3, 4, etc…
FROM THE CATEGORY ARCHIVES:
Still not perfect but at least it gets us off to a great start. For the technically savvy web surfer it is not a problem, but it is for the majority of web surfers.