The big question: Does category.php apply to the children of the targeted category?
The answer: No. So now what?
For those not familiar with the power of category.php within a theme, you can catch up here. In a nutshell, you can apply a custom template to a specific category just by naming the template file with a convention that gets automatically picked up by WordPress. It’s a really awesome feature to take advantage of, but there’s one problem.
Category.php will not apply to the category’s children/sub-categories. So then, how do we apply a template to sub-categories? After lurking around online to find forum threads like this, and brainstorming with a co-worker of mine, I found some solutions to the problem and wanted to share them.
Before we begin:
- You should have some knowledge as to how category.php works in a theme
- You should have some basic understanding of PHP or at the very least, have taken a look at WordPress’ Conditional Tags
- You should have access to your theme’s files for editing purposes
