Wordpress Category Post List

A friend of mine asked me to write a Wordpress function the other day that printed out a list of categories and any posts in those categories, along with any meta data that might be in the post.

All the function does is to get a list of categories and then for each category get a list of the posts associated with that category. Not much really, but useful in some circumstances.

function getCategoryPostList($args = array())
{
    if (is_string($args)) {
        parse_str($args, $args);
    }

    // Set up defaults.
    $defaults = array(
        'echo'        => true,
    );

    // Merge the defaults with the parameters.
    $options = array_merge($defaults, (array)$args);

    $output = '';

    // Get top level categories
    $categories = get_categories(array('hierarchical' => 0));
    // Loop through the categories found.
    foreach ($categories as $cat) {
        // Print out category name
        $output .= '<p><strong>' . $cat->name . '</strong></p>';

        // Get posts associated with the category
        $tmpPosts = get_posts('category=' . $cat->cat_ID);
        // Make sure some posts were found.
        if (count($tmpPosts) > 0) {
            $output .= '<div>';
            // Loop through each post found.
            foreach ($tmpPosts as $post) {
                // Get post meta data.
                setup_postdata($post);
                // Print out post information
                $output .= '<p><a href="' . get_page_link($post->ID) . '" title="' . $post->post_title . '">' . $post->post_title . '</a></p>';
                $output .= '<p>' . $post->post_excerpt . '</p>';
            }
            $output .= '</div>';
        }
    }

    if ($options['echo'] == true) {
        // Print out the $output variable.
        echo $output;
    }

    // Return
    return $output;
}

To use the function pop it into your functions.php file and call it in your theme like this:

getCategoryPostList();

This will probably work best if you create a custom page template and put the function call in there.

The only problem with this function is that if you have a post in multiple categories then you will find the post appearing multiple times. This wasn't an issue for the person I wrote it for, but if you want to change this and think of a good way to do it then post a comment!