Now we're going to take a look at a Category archive.

Unlike Date archive, Category archives can be a little bit more specific.

We have the Generic Category archive and then we have the ability, like, with pages

to create a specific template based on an ID or a slug of a given category.

First we have to make sure that we have our Categories set up properly.

So, let's come under Posts, Categories and

then see that we have a couple different categories available.

I'm going to Delete, Update and Edit my uncategorized and call this Updates.

So, I now have a few categories.

I have my Special category.

I have my Travel category, and I have my Updates category.

And I can see that I have two posts in this.

And I wanna spread these out so that they're all covered.

So I'll come under my Posts.

Quick Edit.

Update that one that way.

And Update this one this way.

So now when I come on to my site, and on my blog I have Categories listed here, I

could then begin to click through each of these and see these templates in action.

So, let's take a look at the first one.

When I click on Updates, I see this is a category archive, Updates at the top,

and then the blog listings below it.

So if we come into the category.php file we could see that this is

whats controlling this archive page.

However, we can get more specific here.

For example, let's click into Travel.

And you'll notice that we now have a customized header that

appears across the top.

Again, if we click on Updates, we see this.

Click on Travel, and we see this.

Notice we have different styling here.

Different content here and

then down below we even have a different loop with different data displaying there.

How are we doing this one?

Well. [BLANK_AUDIO]

If we come back into our categories,

we can see that our Travel category is tagged with the ID of four.

And one of the easiest ways to find that out is to go into Categories, click on it,

and then see Tag ID equal to four in the URL.

What this allows us to do is create a category-4 template and

then customize that to appear a certain way.

For example, if you look at the category notice that we have this line here,

as well as the extra metadata.

However, in this one we don't, and we don't have any metadata here, as well.

So, the category four is going to be whatever ID is set to four.

And this is a useful way to do it if the category names may change slightly

because if the category names are going to change, we want to use the ID number.

The ID number does not change.

However, we also have the ability to create an ID, or

create a category template based on the slug.

So if we come back to our Categories and

we look at Special, our slug here is Special.

So, we also have a category-special template that's a little bit different.

What this one is doing, is displaying a completely customized template.

That as we notice, isn't even hooked up to the rest of WordPress.

It's just putting some custom HTML and then a fun picture in.

This may or may not be what you want to have on your site, or

the archive of articles that are special.

Chances are you'll want something a little more classic looking,

but the point here being that you can do quite a wide range of

customizations based on what category it is.

Now, the other thing that I have going on,

is to do this styling, it's relying on the body class link.

So remember how we added the body class link.

And that tells us archive category category-travel.

So I know, based on a class on my body tag that I'm on a category travel page.

So what I can then do is, if I highlight this nav bar.

We could see that category Travel, nav bar default, was set as background yellow.

So in my CSS I have a special tag that just styles this page,

but it's not applying the styles based on the PHP.

It's actually the output that's being put into the head tag, or

I'm sorry, the body tag, and then we can use that within our CSS.

But this should give you the full range of working with some different options for

creating Category archives.