Hack number of posts on category

You need something like the following in your category.php template:

if( is_category('1') & (2 == $paged) ) {
        $GLOBALS['wp_query']->query_vars['posts_per_page'] = 500;
        $GLOBALS['wp_query']->query_vars['paged'] = 1;
        $GLOBALS['wp_query']->query_vars['offset'] = 3;
        query_posts($GLOBALS['wp_query']->query_vars);
}

Here’s why what you have doesn’t work: for one thing, you’re setting $paged to 2 when you have $paged = 2.

For another, when you say that posts_per_page is 500, the query will assume that the first page had 500 also, and so show only the next 500 posts from category #1.

So what you really want to use is the offset query variable, and query as though it were the first page but offset by as many posts as you have on the real first page.

That worked an absolute treat. Thanks so much for you time on this!!

unline asamuels this is the first successful find for me regarding this subject. Thanks for your solution, filosofo. I wanted the simpler version, the existing posts_per_page value (from the options) on the index page, but in a specific category I wanted all posts.

In order to apply your solution to my code, I need to set a very high number, such as:

$GLOBALS['wp_query']->query_vars['posts_per_page'] = 1000;
query_posts($GLOBALS['wp_query']->query_vars);
//now we're going into the loop

using -1 or ‘-1’ returns nothing. Not a problem for me this time, but is there an explanation for this, for posteriority? And could this be solved using filters/actions instead of putting the code into the template?