Dani Llewellyn

This isn’t possible when you’re including both listings on the same page. If you have two separate pages then this is possible in a very limited way based on the top-level page in the hierarchy (it only works on posts of the type page).

I’m assuming this won’t help you because it’s such a limited feature currently, but I’ve included the details of how it works for completeness:

Currently the code will look at the top-level page in the hierarchy chain to determine the section of the listing, and will look for a specific template in your theme called a-z-listing-$section.php where $section is the slug of the top-level page.

For example if I have pages like:

home
blog
- a-z-listing
about

Then the a-z-listing at blog/a-z-listing will use blog as it’s “section” name. This requires that both blog and a-z-listing are page post-type, and the a-z-listing page has blog set as it’s parent.

I want to improve this so that it is easier to use different templates, because the “section” method is very restrictive and was built as a dirty hack for a specific client site with the intention to “fix it later”.

That functionality isn’t built-in currently, but you can add it easily by copying wp-content/plugins/a-z-listing/templates/a-z-listing.php into your theme/child-theme and adding the required links.

Specifically you need to add links which point their href to #letters:

<!-- ... snipped ... -->
<div class="letter-section" id="<?php $a_z_query->the_letter_id(); ?>">
	<h2>
		<span><?php $a_z_query->the_letter_title(); ?></span>
	</h2>
	<div><ul>
		<!-- ... snipped ... -->
	</ul></div>
	<a href="#letters">Back to top</a>
</div>
<!-- ... snipped ... -->

You might want to use the theme customizer’s “custom css” feature to add some styles to make it look nicer.

You change the style in the same way you change the style of anything on your site. You could, for example, edit your theme’s style.css or you could use the Customizer’s “Custom CSS” feature.

The inbuilt styling is not meant as a “works for everyone” solution but is an example of how you could style the page. It is anticipated that it will work for most people out of the box but there is a likelihood that it won’t fit your site’s design in which case you can either add style overrides to the inbuilt style or you can turn off the styling entirely and write your own styles from scratch.

If you require customizing the HTML output of the listing then you need to copy the file from wp-content/plugins/a-z-listing/templates/a-z-listing.php into your theme’s root folder and edit appropriately. This file follows a WordPress-style “the loop” mechanism extended to support the separation of posts into groups by letter.

To display all products in the specials category you would use the terms= attribute:

[a-z-listing post-type="product" taxonomy="product_cat" terms="specials"]

The difference between this and what you already tried is the omission of the display=terms attribute which switches the list to displaying terms from the taxonomy indicated in taxonomy=. Without the display= attribute the list uses taxonomy= and terms= to filter the post-type= posts.

If you want to dig-in I’m expecting that PHP died due to resource exhaustion or timeout – you can try finding the error log of your server to see whether my guess is correct which might give you ideas to mitigate it for now such as either increasing the memory limit for PHP or finding out whether it timed out due to mysql responding slowly or just a nature of physics. if mysql is responding slowly you could try adding in a memory cache or attempting to tune mysql or both.

I would expect you’re hitting an upper-limit due to the size of the list. I’m working on improving the performance and issues with large lists for the future, but I don’t have a solution for you right now :-(.

The code needs to be added to an appropriate template in your theme. The template-hierarchy page and image are helpful to determine an appropriate file to add or modify.

This will require adding a template to your theme and customising accordingly in a manner similar to other theme coding. The template is saved in wp-content/plugins/a-z-listing/templates/a-z-listing.php; copy it to your theme at wp-content/themes/<yourtheme>/a-z-listing.php and amend to output the image.

Depending on how your image is attached to the post you might want to use the_post_thumbnail() for the actual output, though that only works with images attached via the “featured image” functionality.