The Custom Query String (CQS) WordPress plugin is not that well known, but it is a powerful plugin offering functionality I have been seeking for ages on my blog. The plugin allows you to specify how many pages to display on different sections of your blog, such as 5 posts on your home page, 10 posts on your archives, 30 posts on your search results, etc.
In the WordPress Options Reading screen there is a section where you can set the number of blog posts to display.
This is all well and good, but this setting will apply to every page on your blog. This isn’t very intuitive. Let’s say for example I want to display 5 blog posts at most on my home page. I can set this by using the text box shown above. My blog home page will look fine, showing the last 5 posts, but it doesn’t take into account the archives or search results pages.
Anyone doing a search on my blog would only get to see 5 posts per page. This is not very useful, especially if many search results are returned. The user will have to keep pressing the Next or Previous links at the bottom of each page to see the next set of results.
This is likely to annoy visitors fast. If they can’t find information on your blog quickly then they’re likely to go elsewhere. This is where the Custom Query String (CQS) WordPress plugin helps out. It enables you to specify how many pages are displayed on each section of your blog.
The plugin options page look as follows.
In this example you can see that I display 3 posts on my home page, but I allow up to 30 posts to display in the search results page. This enables me to keep my home page clean. showing just the latest 3 posts, but still provides the facility for my search page to show more results. This is far more user friendly.
You can customize any of the following pages shown in the image below. You select the page from the dropdown list and then set the number of pages to display for that page.
You can also specify how many posts to display on a category by category basis as follows.
The plugin itself is no longer being developed, but it is robust and I have had no problems using it. It is definitely worth a closer look.
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3 responses so far ↓
1 John Lampard // Jul 2, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Thanks for the information, this plugin is worth looking into. People looking up my archived posts see truncated versions of each post (which is fine by me) but I’ve always wanted have more archive posts visible per page rather than the default number of homepage posts. This might be what I’m after!
2 Buffer Dump 1JAN08 « Feet up, eyes closed, head back // Jan 2, 2008 at 5:02 am
[...] The Custom Query String (CQS) plugin – writeup at Technical-Itch.co.uk; “that well known, this is a powerful plugin offering functionality I have been seeking for ages on my blog. The plugin allows you to specify how many pages to display on different sections of your blog, such as 5 posts on your home page, 10 posts on your archives, 30 posts on your search results, etc.” [...]
3 Adal // Sep 20, 2010 at 10:43 pm
To get those functionalities you could also spend a couple hours learning template tags and writing your own condition tags…
But I guess it’s nice to have those options in a form if you don’t know php.
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