Fix for pagination in categories

I noticed lots of ppl (including myself) are having problems with pagination in categories, where the first page would work, but the second page, “page/2/” would send you to the 404 – page.

After googling around for 20 minutes I only found bits of the solution, which I merged together and got it working! Do like this:

1. You don’t need to change anything in the Dashboard -> Reading Settings as some has suggested. Put it back to how it was.

2. In your query_posts, remove the “post_per_page” limitation, since sin category.php this doesn’t work when you want to generate pages.

so in my case query_posts(array ('cat' => $current_cat_id, "paged" => "$paged", "posts_per_page" => "1", ));

becomes query_posts(array ('cat' => $current_cat_id, "paged" => "$paged" ));

3. Copy the following lines and put them in your functions.php. In the last you set the numbers of posts you want to show for each page:

add_action( 'parse_query', 'category_posts_per_page', 10, 1 );
function category_posts_per_page( $q_obj ) {
if( is_category() )
$q_obj->query_vars['posts_per_page'] = 1; // Change this example value
}

Now, techically, pagination is working, but one (big) problem is remaining.
a) Lets say you are using customized permalinks, like I am doing; the classic: /%category%/%postname%/.
b) And lets pretend you have category called Music.
The problem you will be having is that pagination WILL work if you type: (your_site_url)/categories/music, but if will fail when wordpress sends the viewer to (your_site_url)/music directly, which wordpress loves to do.

Solution?

4. This one was hard to find, but it’s easy and works! Just download and install the Category Pagination Fix plugin .

Now, suddenly, pagination is working in categories no matter url structure. Yeah! ??