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.