The chronological format of blogs is great for regular readers, but what about those readers who enter your site via a particular blog post on a particular topic, and want to read more on that particular topic? You can draw their attention to your topics with Categories and Tags, but an even better way is to draw their attention to the headlines of similar posts using the Related Posts plugin.

Related Posts will insert a list of similar blog posts at the end of your post based on the Tags you have used. For example, if I tag several posts with “Plugins” then Related Posts will list those posts. You can also use Related Posts to display a random list of posts, or your most commented posts, if there are no similar Tags available.

If you choose “Auto Insert Related Posts” it will display them at the end of any single blog post view. This is the easiest way to start using the plugin, however if you want to control the location and styling of the list you can edit your theme and place the code exactly where you want it.

For example, here I have edited the single.php file of a theme to place the Related Posts list after the post metadata, and wrap it in Div tags that I can use to style it.

<div class="relatedposts">
<?php if (function_exists('wp_related_posts')) ( wp_related_posts() ) ; ?>
</div>

By applying styling to the Div I can blend the Related Posts output into my WordPress theme.

.relatedposts {
	margin: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
	padding-left: 5px;
	border-width: 2px;
	border-style: dashed;
	border-color: #cfcfcf;
	}

Download the plugin here.

Tagged as: PHP, Plugins, WordPress