In my previous post I talked about a Lorelle blog post on creating single post templates for different categories.

After using the code snippets “has is” I tryed to build a more flexible solution so I’ve come up with this little function:

function getSingleTemplate(){
 
  $category = get_the_category();
  $templateName = TEMPLATEPATH . '/single_' . $category[0]->category_nicename .'.php';
 
  if (!file_exists($templateName)){
    $templateName = TEMPLATEPATH . '/single_default.php';
  }
  return $templateName;
}

This function must be called inside the single.php template: it gets the first post’s category, searches for a template named like “single_post_first_category_slug.php” and returns its path; if the file doesn’t exists it will return the single_default.php template path.

My single.php template:

<?php
$post = $wp_query->post;
include( getSingleTemplate() );
?>

Today, while trying to customize the single.php template for a specific category I found a pretty old article written by Lorelle:

Creating Multiple Single Posts for Different Categories.

Her tip is really simple and really useful: just rename your single.php to single1.php and create a new single2.php with your category specific layout; after that, create a new single.php file with this code:

<?php
$post = $wp_query->post;
if ( in_category('1') ) {
  include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/single2.php');
} else {
  include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/single1.php');
}
?>

So, if the post is in category 1 WordPress will use the single2.php otherwise it will use single1.php.

Updated

I wrote a more flexible solution: check it out.