Category Subdomains 0.4.5

Category Subdomains is a WordPress plugin that lets you setup subdomains on your site that point to Categories or Pages on your wordpress install. This site is using the plugin. The main page shows all posts, however my travel subdomain shows only the posts in my Travel category and it’s children.

This plugin was first written as Subster Rejunevation by Dax Herrera. It was subsequently updated to work with more recent versions or wordpress by Adam Dempsey and Gilad Gafni. I have continued the version numbering on from where the last developer left off.

I originally just wanted to add a few features that I wanted for my site. However it turned out that to do what I wanted it would be easier to pretty much rewrite most of the plugin. I added some classes that store a lot of information about the categories and pages which are to be subdomains. This means a lot of repetitive code code be removed from the main plugin. This has made the code base much easier to look at and navigate.

Now most people wont care about that and just want to know what’s changed:

1. Added category option to show only pages tied to the category
2. If not in a subdomain only non-tied pages are shown
3. Site widget, sidebar widget which lists the category subdomains, good for navigation
4. Categories widget, sidebar widget with a list of categories in the current subdomain. If not in a subdomain will show like normal categories widget.
Also a few bug fixes where links were pointing to the wrong subdomains.

The plugin still automatically turns your categories into subdomains. Next thing I’ll change is to remove that so that you configure each one you want to be a subdomain. I’ve also got some other ideas i want to work through and get things like Calendar and Recent Posts only showing the relevant posts when you’re in a subdomain.

Plugin is available here: Category Subdomains 0.4.5

If you’ve used a past version of this plugin and try this one to find things don’t work quite as you expected then please let me know. Also if you’re new to this plugin and need help or want to report a bug then also just let me know.

WordPress, themes and plugins

Well if anyone is actually reading this site yet they might notice that it breaks occasionally.

I’ve never been entirely happy with the way wordpress worked until I discovered a plugin called Subster, this lets you configure a wordpress category as a subdomain. Not only that but you can then specify a different theme for that subdomain. For instance I have a lot of travel posts that I wanted to appear on travel.casualgenius.com using this plugin I can.

However there were a few problems, the different theme part didn’t really work, and some things I wanted that it didn’t provide. So I’m setting about writing the plugin to do what I want. This includes filtering page lists and providing extra widgets.

It’s still work in progress, hence the site going a bit funny sometimes, but once it’s done I’ll post the latest version here. I’ll also try and track down the latest author, it seems the plugin is like an unwanted child and has been through about 4 authors so far, and see if he’s still developing it or not.

If anyone spots this and is interested in the plugin feel free to quiz me about it.