Wordpress - How to create custom post template

Question

I'm developing a website with wordpress and I'm using underscores starter theme. I have 2 different categories and I need to create single templates for each one.

I'm having problems with that because wordpress doesn't assume my custom single templates and I don't understand why.

I already tried to put the single template in root theme directory, tried single-cat-categoryname.php or just single-categoryname.php, create a folder single but nothing works.

How can I create custom single posts templates with underscores?

Thank you

Answer 1

According to the template hierarchy you can create template for category or term but not on single post which contain category

Ref: Template Hierarchy

but you can create template page where you can choose template for each post

Ref:Page Templates

Answer 2

You should name the templates like this: category-slug.php in your root theme folder.

Just replace slug with the slug of the category you want.

Hope it helps.

Answer 3

In Wordpress a custom template for a single category must be named

category-{category id}.php
category-{slug}.php

Wordpress templates's hierarchy is based in names and ids, you can learn more about this here: Template hierarchy

Answer 4

Using Wordpress's (WP for short) {$type}_template filters (see here) you can do a check for various scenarios for when WP is trying to lift post template files.

If I understand your situation correctly, you'll want to tap into the single_template filter and do some validating to ensure that the WP post meets your criteria.

Here's a sample piece of code:

function override_single_template( $template ) {
    global $post;

    if ( has_category( "cat_name", $post ) ) {
       // set $template to file location of custom `single` template
       // NOTE: file name for template does not have to follow WP post template 
             // naming convention BUT is preferred
    } 

    return $template;
}

add_filter( 'single_template', 'override_single_templates' );