Whilst working on another wordpress based site I had a requirement to only show the latest post on the front page but when clicking through to the category I needed to show all posts.
Unfortunately Wordpress only has a global “blog posts” setting which applies to all pages. This was no good to me as I was relying heavily on the categories as a core navigation tool within the template design and by only showing the latest post when clicking a category menu item the usability of the site was massively impaired.
Thankfully I tracked down a plugin that allows you to change the number of posts shown depending on the page type, sadly it’s not supported by the author any more but you can still grab it from his archive at drunkenmonkey.org, the file you seek is “custom query string”.
