Here’s the code I used, is this wrong?

Here’s my plain Template

Anyway, when I make a new post, there is nothing in the drop down for me to select this plain template to test. I’ve added your plugin, activated it, but I must not understand the instructions when you say to make a template ie: develop it. What else must I do, and am I to put your code at the top of all single.php blog_page.php pages as well.

I guess I need the “plugin for dummies” install instructions as I’m not understanding what steps to take next and there’s nothing in my dropdown box to add a new category template when I go to add a new category.

Could you please help with a little more details on how to use this? Thanks very much for your good work, I just can’t figure it out

As is often the case for freelancers, I let personal projects take a back-seat to client work. I am in the process of doing a major update to the design for this site. Subscription to comments is one of the many plugins on my list to integrate as a part of those efforts. A forum is also on my list – to enable a wider degree of conversation between myself, plugin users and other plugin developers who might want to collaborate on other projects. More details soon on both of those I hope.

BTW: why does u use anything like subscribe comments?

However, as of WordPress 2.7 there is the concept of sticky posts which you might look into as a way to simplify your posting process regarding front page content that would result in a solution to your particular challenge. Nathan Rice’s Definitive Sticky Posts Guide would be a good place to start. I also installed Admin Show Sticky on my site so that I can see at a glance which posts are currently stuck to the front page.

If that does not work, another option which *might* work is to ensure that your ‘all posts’ category is alphabetically last in your list so that the “primary” categories you’re interested in will be picked up first in the loop logic to determine what category template to use.

Is there any way I can specify each post to use a specific template? I want my cooking posts to have a different template, and the “All posts” category messes this up. At the same time I need that category to stay as is.

Right now, I can’t say that I see the value in having that kind of feature. To the site visitor and content author, there would be no difference between many category template files in one theme versus a series of themes with one category template in each. To me, creating a copy of an existing category template and modifying it for the new use is a pretty easy process. There would be more work in creating separate style.css, folder and template files. Perhaps you can explain more about why to help me understand the rationale better?

You’re always welcome to customize my code for your own uses. You might leverage some of the new parent / child theme work that the community is starting to do for this type of implementation.