Archives.php not working in wordpress

Its been a while since ive done wordpress templating and for some reason i cant get the archives.php to work. i have this:

<?php
/* Template Name: Archives */
get_header(); ?>
<div id='content'>
<?php get_sidebar('left'); ?>

<div id='column2-wide'>
    <?php if (have_posts()): while (have_posts()): the_post(); ?>
        <?php if ( in_category(16) ) { ?>
            <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
            <div class="post">
                <?php echo the_content(); ?>
            </div>
        <?php } ?>
    <?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</div><!-- column2 -->
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Then created a page in the admin and chosen the Archives template to be used from the dropdown.

However the posts just dont seem to show. Am i missing something? The very same code works in the index.php file. It seems its just not working when im trying to display posts in a page.

It could well be im missing a file as I started developing the theme using a skeleton theme by Kennethreitz which can be found here:

h开发者_开发技巧ttps://github.com/kennethreitz/wordpress-theme-skeleton/

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

fl3x7

EDIT--> Also ive removed the category check so it should just list all posts but instead what it does is just echo the title of the current page if that helps

---

I'm assuming that "16" is the category ID? According to the WordPress docs for in_category, if you're querying by ID it should be passed as an integer.

$category (mixed) (required) One or more categories specified by ID (integer), name or slug (string), or an array of these

With your current code, the in_category check is failing every time since it is checking for an association with the category named "16." Try this instead:

if ( in_category(16) ) {
    ...
}

---

Thanks to the help provided by Hans. This is what I did:

query_posts( array ( 'category_name' => 'foo', 'posts_per_page' => 10 ) );


if (have_posts()): while (have_posts()): the_post(); ?>
        <h2><a href='<?php the_permalink(); ?>'><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
        <div class="post">
            <?php echo the_excerpt(); ?>
        </div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>