Frequently Asked Questions:
How to show full posts on WordPress archive and category pages
I’ve been asked a couple times how to force ProPhoto to show full posts when people visit your archive or category pages. Right now, the default for ProPhoto is to show excerpts of the posts in the category and archive pages. So, when a user clicks on an archive month, this is what they see:
If you want to change this so that the full posts are seen, in your WP Admin area, you’ll need to go to your “Design” tab (”Presentation” in WP 2.3.3 and earlier) and select “Theme Editor.” Then choose the file called “Archive (archive.php)” to edit it. (NOTE: don’t get confused with the file called “Archive (archives.php)” – they are named almost exactly the same – you want the one that is not plural.) In that file, look for a line that says:
<?php the_excerpt(''.__('Read More <span class="meta-nav">»</span>', 'ProPhoto').'') ?>
Delete it and then paste in this line:
<?php the_content() ?>
Click “update file” to save your changes and then check your work.
You can also do this with your category pages as well. Just open up the file “Category Template (category.php)” and do the same edit.
A word of caution, however. The ProPhoto theme was built to display excerpts only on these pages for a reason. That reason is to avoid ‘duplicate content,’ which search engines don’t like, and which can get you a small penalty in Google and other search engines. Basically, the issue is, search engines don’t like it when websites have multiple pages with exactly the same content. That seems spammy to them, because a lot of spammy websites have hundreds of pages of duplicate, computer-generated content. When you leave your full posts open on your category and archive pages, you end up with a good deal of duplicate content, because your posts may be shown in full in 4 or more pages: your home page (or paged interior pages), your single post permalink page, your category page, and your archive page. This is why a lot of WordPress themes excerpt posts on archive and category pages. It is also why lots of blogs even excerpt posts on their home page.
Technically, the best search engine friendly way to do things is to have only your single-page permalink post page show the entire post, and have every other place show an excerpt. Now, that’s a little extreme, so ProPhoto was built to be a compromise between what’s good for your readers and what is good for the search engine robots. You’re more than welcome to change your archive and category pages to show the full post, just do it with the awareness that there is search engine optimization tradeoff. At the end of the day, most people’s blogs are for people and not search engine robots, so you may decide that ease-of-use for your readers is more important. I just thought you might like to know why the theme (and many themes) are built that way.
Questions? Instead of emailing for support, leave a comment below so everyone can benefit from any clarification.
Great tip about the search engine issue–thanks for sharing that!
HELP! I don’t know why but I can’t access the archives or categories on my blog. It just comes up with an Error 404 message. What am I doing wrong and can I fix it?
@Stephanie: did you recently change your permalink structure under “settings” => “permalinks”? if so, try setting them back to default and saving.
Thank you thank you thank you!
Under archives, Instead of the posts being listed by Month and Year is it possible to list them by the header or title of the post and not the date?
@Ray Dayton: this is not possible, because the whole point of the archive links are to get you to monthly archive pages, not to individual posts.
Thank you for posting this. It works on most themes and saved my day!
Hi Jared, I couldnt find a where to ask this question, sorry if this isnt the right spot! I was wondering how I can make a post ’sticky’ – ie, kept at the very top of my blog for a period of time? Is there a way?
Thanks, Lauren.
@Lauren: if you upgrade your version of WordPress to 2.7, this is a built in feature. that’s the best option. otherwise you’ll have to use a plugin, but it’s always smart to upgrade wordpress, so that’s what i would do. info on upgrading is here:
http://www.prophotoblogs.com/tutorials/wordpress-manual-upgrade/
I have wordpress 2.7 and actually want to do, sort of, the opposite of this. I do NOT want to show full posts on the main page, and instead want to show excerpts that would force people to click through to the full post [because I have so many pictures as part of each post it greatly slows down the load time when they visit the home page of the blog for the first time].
So how do I do that??
@Kirsten: it’s pretty easy. just, when you’re creating a post, at the spot you want it to “Break”, add in a “more” tag from the Post-writing buttons.
AWESOME!! Thank you!! And my goodness, it is always the simplest things…..
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to post this question here, I couldn’t find a topic on it.
When I publish a post, it posts on my Home page, my About page and my Contact page. I only want it to publish to my Home page. How do I change this and keep it from doing it again? I’ve searched all over my dashboard for this.
I have Wordpress 2.7.1
Thanks so much!
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