Goal

Add a screen to your app that shows a scrollable list of the latest posts from a WordPress category you choose. Here’s how: place a button, set its content type to WordPress Post Category, and point it at the category whose posts you want to show. From there the app takes over — when someone taps the button, it pulls the most recent published posts from that category, newest first, and lists them. Tap any post and its full content opens right inside the app: title, featured image, and body.

This is the standard way to bring a blog, a news feed, an announcements channel, or any other stream of WordPress posts into a MAM app.

Before you start

• Where you work. Everything here happens in the WordPress admin, under Mobile App Manager → App Setup. No code, no App Store / Play Store rebuild — the button lives as app content and goes out the moment you publish.
• You need a category with published posts. The screen only lists posts that are published — drafts and private posts are skipped — and that are assigned to the category you pick. Pick an empty category and you’ll get an empty screen. The built-in Uncategorized category is left out of the auto-suggested buttons on purpose.
• Newest first. Posts are always sorted by date, newest at the top — there’s no manual reordering for this screen type. Want a post to move up the list? Publish it (or update its date).
• A note on naming. The UI labels here (tab names, dropdown text, section headers) are described as they appear in a standard install. Your theme or version might word a few things differently — the flow itself doesn’t change.

Steps

1. Open App Setup and choose a placement

1. In the WordPress admin, go to Mobile App Manager → App Setup.
2. Choose where the category list should live:
   • To put it on the home screen, stay on the Main Navigation tab (its builder is headed Home Page Design).
   • To put it in the slide-out drawer, switch to the Left Menu tab.

If your app uses managed user roles, pick the role you’re editing first, using the Content for Role dropdown at the top of the panel. Buttons are stored per role — add one for a single role, and that’s the only role that will see it.

2. Add the button

1. Scroll past your existing buttons to the add-new section at the bottom of the list, marked with a red + (plus) icon.
2. Click the +. A new button appears at the bottom of your list, already carrying a default name and content type — so there’s never a blank slate to configure from scratch.

Each placement holds up to twelve buttons. Hit that limit and the + disappears.

3. Set the content type to WordPress Post Category

1. Expand the new button if it isn’t already open.
2. In the Content Type dropdown, choose WordPress Post Category.

This is what tells the app to open a list-of-posts screen here, instead of a web page, a map, or any other screen type.

4. Choose the category (Content Source)

Once you’ve picked the content type, a second dropdown shows up for the Content Source. Here it’s labeled something like Select WordPress Post Category…, and it lists your site’s categories alphabetically by name.

1. Open the category dropdown.
2. Select the category whose posts you want to list. (Long category names get shortened for display in the dropdown — hover to see the full name.)

That one category is now what drives the screen — it’ll show the latest published posts from it. Want two separate category lists? Add a second button and repeat; each button points at a single category.

5. Name the screen and set its icon

1. In the button’s header row, type the button name into the title field. This is what users see: the label under the button on the home screen, or the row text in the left menu. It doesn’t need to match the category name.
2. Click the icon area to pick an image — from the bundled icon sets or from your media library.
3. Use the Text and Image checkboxes on the button row to control whether the label, the icon, or both are shown.

6. Preview and publish

1. Drag buttons by the move handle to set the order they appear in.
2. Use the Previewer App tab to scan a QR code and view your changes in the WPMAM Previewer app before going live.
3. When you’re happy with it, hit publish to push the new screen out to your app. No store rebuild needed.

What users see

When a user taps the button:

• The app fetches the most recent published posts from the chosen category, newest first. It pulls a batch of the latest posts (on the order of the most recent few dozen), not the entire archive — so even a very large category still loads quickly.
• Each post in the list shows its title, its featured image (when it has one), and the categories it belongs to.
• Tap a post and its full content opens inside the app — the rendered post body, formatted just as WordPress would normally display it.

No featured image? The post still shows up in the list — it just appears without a thumbnail (or with your configured placeholder image, depending on the listing’s settings).

Notes and gotchas

• One category per button. This screen type only ever lists one category. Want several categories together? Add several buttons, or use a content-section-based listing screen instead.
• Empty or Uncategorized categories. An empty category means an empty screen. MAM skips Uncategorized when it auto-suggests starter buttons, so if you want that category surfaced, you’ll need to add its button by hand.
• Subcategories. Each post shows the category names it’s filed under. Pick a parent category and you’ll get posts directly assigned to it; whether child-category posts show up too depends on your WordPress category setup.
• Ordering is by date only. You can’t drag-to-reorder posts inside the list — they follow the post date, newest first. To move one up, re-publish it or update its date.
• Saved type and source are frozen per button. Behind the scenes, the button stores its content type and chosen category as its source. Change either one after launch and you change what users see — so double check the category any time you switch a button’s type.

Category images (no code)

Want each category to carry its own image? You can — and the app will show it next to the posts filed under that category, with no code and no app rebuild.

1. Install and activate the Categories Images plugin (wp.org slug categories-images) — it’s available from the WPMAM → Software menu, or search “Categories Images” under Plugins → Add New.
2. Go to Posts → Categories, edit a category, and set its image in the new Image field the plugin adds.
3. Publish your app content as usual — the category image is picked up automatically and travels along with each post’s category info.

Fallback order. If your theme or a directory plugin already supplies a category icon (a Templatic theme’s category icon, for example), that one wins. The Categories Images image only steps in when nothing else is supplied — so turning the plugin on never overrides an icon you’ve already set elsewhere.

Related

• Building Your App: Add a new screen (button) to your app — the full button/placement workflow this article is a specific case of.
• Building Your App: Style your listings (colors, stars, favorites, rows) — the per-listing layout and appearance settings that also apply to category lists.
• Content classes overview — the catalog of screen types and what each one renders.
• App Settings Reference: Listings — list-screen options such as placeholder image, sharing, and row styling.

What’s next

Once the category list is live, the natural next steps are styling it — row layout, colors, whether to show favorites or share buttons — in the listing’s settings, and adding more category buttons for your other content streams. Then preview and publish.