Displaying posts from a Category where the Category ID or slug is not known

Question

This may be a really simple question but I've struggled to find an answer either searching here, WP forum or via Google.

I have a number of different categories and I would like to use just category.php. At the moment I have to create a thecatname-category.php page for each category but this is not very efficient as my I would have to create a new one every time a new Category was created.

So I need to find a workable solution that will display all posts from a selected Category where the category ID is passed to category.php and then display posts from that Category.

Hope that makes sense!

Thanks,

Kev

Answer 1

Wordpress uses the following hierarchy to determine which file should be used to display the category page:

1. category-slug.php
2. category-ID.php
3. category.php
4. archive.php
5. index.php

Removing all of the "category-slug.php" and "category-ID.php" files whilst leaving just one file called "category.php" should do the trick.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates