Using Conditional Tags for Page Titles

You can give different sections of your site a unique title so that your readers know where they are within your site. It’s a little thing - but its helpful to keep your visitors mindful of where they are at. For instance, if they are on a category page - it’s nice to have a title at the top that says something like “You are browsing the X category”… or when they click on one of your tags, give an announcement at the top of the page that says something like “Browsing posts tagged with: X” - that kind of thing.

With WordPress templates, you can create all sorts of different templates for different custom displays. However, to accomplish the title idea - you really only need one single template and a handful of conditional tags.

Create a template and name it: archive.php

That template should contain all the template tags necessary to display your posts and content the way you want them displayed.

To give that page a title, depending on what type of page is being displayed - you just need to add conditional tags at the top, and ABOVE the Loop¹ . Here’s a sample of the conditional tags I use on my archive.php template:

<?php if ( is_day() ) : ?>
<h2 class="page-title"><?php printf(__('Daily Archives: <span>%s</span>'), get_the_time('F jS, Y')) ?></h2>

<?php elseif ( is_month() ) : ?>
<h2 class="page-title"><?php printf(__('Monthly Archives: <span>%s</span>'), get_the_time('F Y')) ?></h2>

<?php elseif ( is_year() ) : ?>
<h2 class="page-title"><?php printf(__('Yearly Archives: <span>%s</span>'), get_the_time('Y')) ?></h2>

<?php elseif ( isset($_GET['paged']) && !empty($_GET['paged']) ) : ?>
<h2 class="page-title"><?php _e('Blog Archives') ?></h2>

<?php elseif ( is_tag() ) : ?>
<h2 class="page-title"><?php single_tag_title('Posts Tagged With: '); ?></h2>

<?php endif; ?>

Take a quick look at the very last conditional tag in my code bits above:

<?php elseif ( is_tag() ) : ?>
<h2 class="page-title"><?php single_tag_title('Posts Tagged With: '); ?></h2>

The first line poses a question: Is this a tag page?

If the answer is yes.. then the title displayed at the top says “Posts Tagged With: TAGNAME”.

It’s a small gesture - but much appreciated by browsers of your site content.

1. the loop starts with: if(have_posts(… [↩]