Make a tag based related posts list for WordPress

We know that the related posts & recent posts are essential for blogs. The WordPress offer a default recent post widget for us.

From WordPress plugin directory, we can download some good related posts plugins. But I like to use code snippets instead of plugins for such matters.

Today we are going to create a simple related post list for our posts. It utilize tags to find the related posts.

First it retrieve the post’s tags. If a post has tags, the first one is extracted and used in a query that retrieves posts with the same tag.

By default, this code displays up to five related posts. To change this number, we want to edit line 9 of this code.

• Open the single.php file in our theme.
• Paste the following code in side the loop:

</ul>

	<h2>Related posts</h2>
	<?php
	//for use in the loop, list 5 post titles related to first tag on current post
	$tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
	if ($tags) {
	  echo 'Related Posts';
	  $first_tag = $tags[0]->term_id;
	  $args=array(
		'tag__in' => array($first_tag),
		'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
		'showposts'=>5,
		'caller_get_posts'=>1
	   );
	  $my_query = new WP_Query($args);
	  if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
		while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
		  <p><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></p>
		  <?php
		endwhile;
	  }
	}
	?>

Save the file, and then reload our blog. If we have tags for our posts, we can find a list of related posts in our single posts.

Recent Posts

1. Disabling Payment Methods in WooCommerce Based on Conditions
2. How to Update Product Quantity in WooCommerce Using Custom Code
3. Dynamically Generating a Table of Contents in WordPress
4. Direct Checkout in WooCommerce - Add Product to Cart from Checkout Page & Skip Shop, Product, and Cart Pages
5. Understanding the Impact of git reset --hard Command

This article was published on July 11, 2014

Your Questions / Comments

If you found this article interesting, found errors, or just want to discuss about it, please get in touch.