Category Trades on Blogs

[walrus]

Originally Posted by Schpork

Mmh yes, even though I haven't had any luck setting it up yet the idea seems good, quality traffic should be a tad higher. Would be nice if somebody explains (I know every theme is different but still) how to add category trades.

Schpork

I've been playing around more with this over the weekend and I think Thumbler might have the right idea with themes. So I'll try to explain it using that mode.

I can't emphasize enough, be sure and back up your theme. Also, if you can't follow that theme well enough to understand how it assembles all of the pieces together to make your web page, then you should spend some time reading the tutorials on wordpress.org before you do this.

I'll use the WP link organizer in the example.

Make a link trade category for each of your post categories you want to trade with. Be sure to make a main category for your index page. In the example, I'll explain how to do the main and an amateur category setup for separate trades. Just keep repeating until you have trades setup for all the categories you want to trade with.

1. In WP, create two link categories, main and amateur.
2. Check for the ID number on your post categories for amateur and make a note of it.
3. Copy the archive.php and sidebar.php files from your theme.
4. Rename the copy of the archive.php to category-ID.php where ID is the ID number from step 2.
5. Rename the copy of sidebar.php to sidebaramateur.php
6. Edit sidebaramateur.php. Where your "LINKS" or blogroll or whatever is located, replace that statement with:

<?php wp_get_linksbyname('amateur'); ?>

7. Edit category-ID.php. Where you find your call to the sidebar

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

, replace with

<?php include 'sidebaramateur.php'; ?>

8. Edit sidebar.php Where your "LINKS" or blogroll or whatever is located, replace that statement with:

<?php wp_get_linksbyname('main'); ?>

9. Upload updated files to your server and test. If you have a problem, simply deleting the category-ID.php file should resolve any issues.
10. Follow these same steps, except 8 for all the category trades you want to setup.

Since WP themes come in multiple varieties these steps may or may not work with your theme. For example, one of my themes actually has 4 files it uses to make up the sidebar so this wouldn't have worked as written for that theme. You should familiarize yourself well enough with the theme you are using to make sure you understand how it makes up your pages.

Note: your main page and all other pages that are not category pages will have the "main" links on them.