How to Add Odd/Even Class to Your Post in WordPress Themes

Want to add a touch of visual interest to your WordPress blog posts? Adding odd and even classes can help you achieve a unique and engaging design by styling every other post differently.

We frequently receive questions from our readers about how to apply this technique. While many WordPress themes don’t offer a built-in option for odd and even post classes, it’s a relatively simple process to add them yourself.

In this article, we’ll show you how to add odd/even class to your post in WordPress themes.

Why Add Odd/Even Class to Your Posts in WordPress Themes?

Many WordPress themes use an odd or even class for WordPress comments. It helps users visualize where one comment ends and the next one begins.

Similarly, you can use this technique for your WordPress posts. It looks aesthetically pleasing and helps users quickly scan pages with lots of content. It is particularly helpful for the homepage of magazine or news websites.

Having said that, let’s see how to add an odd and even class to your posts in WordPress theme.

Adding Odd/Even Class to Posts in WordPress Theme

WordPress generates default CSS classes and adds them to different items on your website on the fly. These CSS classes help plugin and theme developers add their own styles for different items.

WordPress also comes with a function called post_class, which is used by theme developers to add classes to post item. See our guide on how to style each WordPress post differently.

The post_class is also a filter, which means you can hook your own functions to it. This is exactly what we will be doing here.

Simply add this code to your theme’s functions.php file, in a site-specific plugin, or in a code snippets plugin.

function oddeven_post_class ( $classes ) {
   global $current_class;
   $classes[] = $current_class;
   $current_class = ($current_class == 'odd') ? 'even' : 'odd';
   return $classes;
}
add_filter ( 'post_class' , 'oddeven_post_class' );
global $current_class;
$current_class = 'odd';

We recommend adding this code using the WPCode plugin. It’s the best code snippets plugin that makes it safe and easy to add custom code in WordPress.

To begin, you need to install and activate the free WPCode plugin. For instructions, see this guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress dashboard.

Then, click the ‘+ Add Custom Snippet’ button under the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option.

Next, you need to select a code type from the list of options that appear on the screen.

For this tutorial, choose ‘PHP Snippet’ as the code type.

You’ll now be directed to the Create Custom Snippet page.

From here, add a title for your code snippet, which can be anything to help you remember what the code is for.

After that, paste the code from above into the ‘Code Preview’ box.

Once that’s done, simply switch the toggle from ‘Inactive’ to ‘Active’ and click the ‘Save Snippet’ button.

This function simply adds odd to the first post, then even, and so on.

You can find the odd and even classes in your site’s source code. Simply take the mouse to a post title and then right click to select Inspect or Inspect Element.

Now that you have added even and odd classes to your posts. The next step is to style them using CSS. You can add your custom CSS to your child theme’s stylesheet, the theme customizer, or by using the WPCode plugin.

Here is a sample CSS that you can use as a starting point:

.even {
background:#f0f8ff;  
} 
.odd {
 background:#f4f4fb;
}

This is how it looked on our test site:

If you don’t know how to use CSS, then you may want to check out our guide on how to easily add custom CSS to your WordPress site.

We hope this article helped you learn how to add odd/even class to your posts in WordPress themes. You may also want to see our guide on how to style your WordPress comments layout and our expert picks of the best WordPress page builders.

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