Related Content

The related content feature lets you display a list of relevant items at the bottom of any article, page, or project. It works in two modes: manual curation or automatic scoring.

Enabling related items

In the editor sidebar, check Show related content on the item. This sets show_related_items: true in the item's JSON file. Nothing is rendered if this flag is false — there is no global default.

Manual mode

If you fill in the Related content field in the editor, those exact items are used. The stored format is an array of {type, slug} references:

{
  "show_related_items": true,
  "related_items": [
    { "type": "article", "slug": "my-other-article" },
    { "type": "project", "slug": "my-project" }
  ]
}

The slugs are resolved against the index at render time. If a referenced item no longer exists, it is silently skipped.

Auto mode

If related_items is empty, the algorithm scores all other content items across all three types (articles, pages, projects):

Items with a score of 0 are excluded. Results are sorted by score descending, then limited to $limit (default: 5). Only index data is read — no full item files are loaded, so this is fast regardless of catalogue size.

Rendering in templates

// In content-articles.php, content-pages.php, content-projects.php
echo render_related_items($item);

// Limit auto mode to 3 results
echo render_related_items($item, 3);

render_related_items() returns empty string if show_related_items is not true, or if no candidates are found.

Generated HTML

<section class="related-items">
  <h3 class="related-items-title">Related Content</h3>
  <ul class="related-items-list">
    <li class="related-item related-item--article">
      <a href="…">
        <span class="related-item-type">Article</span>
        Title of the related article
      </a>
    </li>
  </ul>
</section>

Style .related-items, .related-items-list, .related-item, and .related-item-type in your theme's style.css.

Notes

The $limit parameter only applies to auto mode. In manual mode, all referenced items are displayed regardless of the limit.

The title string ("Related Content") is translatable via __t('related_content', 'Related Content').