I’ve been tweaking the WordPress theme used over at Brothers In Blog (my second blog I coauthor with my brother). Last week I added category and archive totals to the sidebar. One of the things I noticed, which wasn’t there all along, is that my “categories” subtitle appeared twice. If your selected WordPress theme originally used the deprecated template tag “wp_get_cats” and you recently updated the template tag to the newer supported tag, “wp_get_categories”, you might have created some sidebar subtitle redundancy. Here’s what I mean and how to correct it.

What do you mean, redundant subtitles?

The theme I selected included images for popular sidebar sections such as Categories, Archives, Pages, etc. The selected theme also used a deprecated WordPress template tag “wp_list_cats” to display my site’s categories in the sidebar. I wanted to display a post total for each category. During my template tag option research I discovered the tag was replaced with “wp_get_categories.” I updated to the new tag and added “show_count=1″. I got the totals I wanted, but I also got a duplicate section subtitle - “categories.”

Remove the default categories subtitle from your sidebar

The “categories” subtitle appears because the new “wp_get_categories” template tag has an option called “title_li”. By default, this option gets set to “_Categories”; however, if explicitly added to the new tag and left empty, then nothing gets displayed. Since “nothing” is exactly what I want, I add the option inside the parenthesis along with the “show_count=1″, which changed the option to “show_count=1&title_li=” and gave me the output shown below.

Note: I am using double quotes in this post to call out the tags and options; however, in practice, template tag options are surrounded by single quotes inside the parenthesis. Also, the “title_li” option allows me to specify a different subtitle for my categories other than the default “_Categories”. For example, if I wanted to call my category “Topics”, then I would just add that text after the equal sign of the option — “title_li=Topics”

Template tag changes are something that theme designers need to be well aware of; however, if you’ve done some minor tweaks to your theme, you should also be aware of what has changed in WordPress 2.x (assuming you recently upgraded to WordPress 2.x). You can find a complete list of deprecated template tags in the developer doc section of the WordPress.org website.

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Filed under: How-To & Tech Tips