How do I display Category titles on a WP Page?

Question

I am trying to get a list of my Wordpress categories to display on a Page, but haven't cracked this yet.

So far, I have been able to create a custom category page (category-categoryname.php), to display a list of Page Titles associated with a single category. The code I have used for this includes the following Loop:

while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<h4><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h4>

However, I am now trying to display a list of Category titles on a normal WP Page, using the plugin "Post Snippets" to insert the PHP.

Q1: How do I change The Loop to display all Category titles, instead of Pages associated with a single category?

Q2: Is there anything else I need to add, like some code to functions.php etc?

Q3: Would it be easier to create a custom page template, instead of pasting into a regular page?

Note, I am not trying to filter out any categories from the list, like sub-categories or categories without associated pages/posts etc. Although filtering out 'Uncategorised' would be nice.

Thank you for reading

Answer 1

I believe you want wp_list_categories (). With a short set of arguments you should be able to get the results you want, including excluding "uncategorized". Something like:

$args = array(
  'exclude' => 1,
);
wp_list_categories( $args ); 

Answer 2

WordPress Loop only works with posts. Categories (as in terms of category taxonomy) aren't posts and don't have concept of archive in WP.

You can build a list easily via wp_list_categories() and other related functions. For performance reason a page with page template would probably work better for it (so you are not querying number of posts just to throw them away).