Handling Nonexistent Parent Directories

[splorp]

I’ve been thinking about what we could do to automatically (and cleanly) handle parent directories that do not exist by default.

For example, the contents of a given category are available at a URL such as:

http://splorp.me/category/getoffmylawn

But there is no page designated for the parent directory:

http://splorp.me/category/

It would make sense to provide a “category” landing page of some sort, even if it simply echoes a restyled version of the wp_list_categories() function used in the sidebar.

Along with the /category/ subdirectory, we should handle /tag/ and /date/ as well.

[cdharrison]

Just committed a category.php and tag.php file to the theme that should address this. In trying to avoid adding classes to the h1 and category/tag description for these templates, I used some adjacent selectors in layout-advanced.css that may not work in IE6.

Live preview of these changes:

• http://cdharrison.com/stuff/personal/
• http://cdharrison.com/tags/wls/

[cdharrison]

Date-based archives are handled by archive.php. If what I've done for categories and tags works for you, I can update archive.php to match it better...

[cdharrison]

Re-reading the issue, I think I misunderstood the request. If the parent category is empty, you want a list of children posted, correct?

[splorp]

Short answer, yes.

[cdharrison]

Rough, but work in progress: http://cdharrison.com/stuff/design/ - list of child categories is displayed below content. (Placement can be modified, obviously.) Will need to look into this further but it looks like by default parent categories are never empty if their child categories have posts assigned to them.

Case in point:

http://cdharrison.com/stuff/quotes/

Has no posts directly assigned to it. The post displayed actually belongs to a child category:

http://cdharrison.com/stuff/quotes/faith

We could exclude children from the parent pages, but it would run counter to what WP does by default.

[splorp]

It’s a great start.

The list of child categories feels like it should only appear once on the page. Specifically, in relation to the parent category name and description at the top of the page.

[cdharrison]

Just committed an update that should improve display considerably on Advanced. Check it out when you get a chance.

[splorp]

I’ve found a bug with the current category views.

Pagination is missing, so the page only displays the first ten posts in the category. I haven’t tested tag archives, as I don’t currently use tags on any of my posts.

[cdharrison]

Just committed fixes for this.

Preview links:

http://cdharrison.com/tags/photoshop/
http://cdharrison.com/stuff/design/webdevelopment/

[splorp]

Rawk.

[splorp]

I’ve tidied up the look and feel to more closely match the other page views.

The only thing that’s still missing is a handler for the /category/ and /tag/ virtual subdirectories. They still 404 by default.

[cdharrison]

Ah, now I understand. I'll see what I can do to fix.

[cdharrison]

After a bit of research on this, the only way it would be able to do this is by creating a custom template and then assigning that template to a page with a slug name of category or tag. Going to try and ping a few WordPress devs for their thoughts on the matter.

[cdharrison]

Here's the answer I got: http://twitter.com/#!/markjaquith/status/154324264047218688