The Blog

My blog has many categories covering sections such as art, creative writing and even baby pictures.

On each post page there are links to the previous and next posts chronologically.  It’s a neat piece of website navigation but.   But, the problem is it’s blog-wide and when your categories are quite diverse the exact previous or next post might not be of all that interest to the reader.

Someone looking at artwork may well prefer to see only art posts, and when Great Aunt Mildred is browsing the latest baby pictures she’s a tad less interested in a nude life painting of a fully gown woman, however much a masterpiece it might be, offered up next.

The solution?  Funnily enough, provided you can do a spot of PHP editing, the solution is quite straight forward.  Within your theme code (in loop-single.php) will be calls to previous_post_link and next_post_link.

These default to picking from all categories blog-wide but it is possible to restrict the choice to same-category posts only by setting the third parameter to TRUE

previous_post_link($format, $link, $in_same_cat = false, $excluded_categories = ”)

For more information, and coding examples, please check out the following entries:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/next_post_link

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/previous_post_link

Yes, with extra PHP code, you can make things more sophisticated and vary the behaviour depending on the post or category or even make it a reader preference but, for now, this quick-n-dirty change does just the trick.