How To: Enable Pagination in WordPress With Number of Posts Per Page

Pagination is hard to achieve and it’s a well worth time spent to enable this feature on WordPress blogs. At times, we may need to show a set of posts which belong to a particular Category in a single page. This is easy to achieve as we create a new page and embed the following code to display all the posts within a particular category.

<?php query_posts('cat=7&&showposts=10'); ?><br />
<ul><br /><?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?><br />
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?>
</a></li><br /><?php endwhile;?>

The above code displays 10 recent posts from the Category with an id=7.

Now, what if this particular Category had 30 posts and we wish to display these 30 posts in a count of 10 each on one page each. That is, these 30 pages would come on Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 with first 10 posts on Page 1 and Second set of 10 posts in Page 2 and finally the third set of 10 posts in the Page 3.

Let’s try to achieve it now.

Most of the times, the code used to achieve the feat of getting a few posts per page results in page moving forward, but the posts remain the same in every page.

Just try the following code in order to achieve what we need.

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts("category_name=somecat&paged=$paged"); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Change the category_name to the name of the category for which you wish the posts to be paginated.

Let me know if you have any problems using this.