Posts Tagged ‘php’

How to add Related Posts with (or without) Thumbnails to your WP Blog

July 20, 2009 by Emily

Tutorials

Adding related posts to your blog is a great way to help your readers find other posts on your site that interest them. And if you have ads, increasing the number of pageviews on your blog can turn out to be quite lucrative. I recently had a request from a client to use a certain widget that she had seen on many other blogs that adds a list of recent posts along with a thumbnail image from that post. But after looking at the widget and researching the many other plugins that are available to add this functionality, I decided I wanted to find a way to code it directly into the template.

One reason for this is that the more plugins installed on a blog, the more that can slow down the loading time of that blog. If you can hard-code a function into the template, it’s almost always preferable to using a plugin. Plus many of the plugins or widgets I looked at gave very little control over things like styling or where the list appears in the template or even how they even figured out what was “related”. What if you want them to be related by tag instead of category or vice versa? What if you just want other posts by the same author?

After doing some more googling and modifying some of the code I found I figured out how to do everything I wanted to and more. My client was extremely pleased with the results and was amazed that I’d even been able to implement it without using a plugin or the widget she had originally wanted:

“It IS cool! A zillion people are going to see it now and want it on their WP blogs! Thanks!”

Which leads us to this post. I thought I would share my findings so that you can implement the same feature on your own WordPress blog. Below I will show you how to add related posts by category, tag or author. I will preface this by saying you should probably have some very basic knowledge about how to edit a template in WordPress, but for the most part, you can copy the code directly and paste it into your template. That’s it. For people with more advanced knowledge I’ll point out things that you can edit further and customize to your liking.