With upcoming WordPress 2.7, just released in beta 3 as I'm writing this, styling your categories gets even easier. Previously, you more or less had to do a conditional tag thing and echo a specific class to get some custom styling, but no more.

Enter this little line of code:

The only thing it does, when it's inserted in your post's div tag, is write class="post". In other words, you replace your class="post" with post_class().

Why? Well, this little thing adds some other nice classes to each post as well. We've already discussed the sticky post class, sticky, in a previous article here on Devlounge. Besides that one, it adds the following classes:

• category-X where X is the post's category, one for each category, so it could be category-games and category-sports if the posts belong to your games and your sports category.
• tag-X which works exactly the same as category-X, but for tags. So the class tag-monkeys would be added for a post tagged with "monkeys".

So let's say I want to style my games category differently from my other categories. Simple! Just add .category-games to your stylesheet, and style away. Just for the sake of it, let's make all the text green, 'cause I'm in a green period right now:

No, I wouldn't write "green" normally, but then again I wouldn't do all the type green either, so...

Anyway, that's about it. Just replace your regular class="post" part in your divs holding your posts, with post_class(). Then you'll have sticky post support, and more!

But wait, there's more! I sometimes want to style some parts of my blog differently, especially single posts. That's what the single.php template is for in a theme, as you know. I usually control the styling of these single posts by adding a class, appropriately named single. When using post_class() I won't be able to do that.

Wrong! Just add the class you want to add to the ones WordPress already appends to the post, like this in my case:

That will spit out all those category and tag classes, along with a microformat one, and a the one for sticky posts should it be a post marked as sticky, as well as the single class I added.

There you have it. Now get your themes ready for WordPress 2.7 with this lovely new post classes functionality.