Articles
Our articles include how-tos, educational items and observations on the web and WordPress world, for website owners and developers.
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Special Layout for one Category
I want to set up a template specifically for the Growing a Website category, which shows items in date order (oldest first) rather than reverse date order (newest first). First, I need to create a category template with the name category-n.php (where n is the numeric id of the particular category, found by looking at the…
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WordPress Functions
Getting to grips with WordPress functions seems to be the only real way into understanding WordPress enough to be comfortable creating and modifying templates, as I want to do. The Function Reference seems a handy link to remember but the Search function rarely seems to find it (perhaps because it’s incomplete), so here is the…
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Early next steps
A few things I want to test and do on this website: Edit the templates – single, archive, category, post(?) to make the layout more like I want. In particular, I want to remove references to comments and “posted by” and just show which category something is in (and also, perhaps, date and time). Done, for…
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The Home Page
Now it’s time to get the look and the layout of the home page just right. The home page can be static, in that its content can be changed by editing via the admin section only, or it can be dynamic, in that all or part of it can be updated whenever a post is added…
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Plugins
These are the Plugins which I think will be most useful for my “typical” website. Maintenance mode – a handy option which allows you to display a polite “website unavailable” message to visitors, while still allowing signed-in administrators access to view the website. Visualize Advanced Features – provides additional editing buttons to users using the visual…
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Get the Look
Get the look right. Hopefully you have some kind of look – colours, fonts – in mind and ideally a header image, even a logo. Select a likely theme as a basis. See Using Themes and Theme Development for reference. Work on the style.css and header.php and footer.php files to get the fonts, colours, layout and…
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Updateable Home Page
What I want is an updateable home page and a set of subsidiary pages, including a subsidiary blog (with the typical blog front page). It seems that this combination is not formally supported within WordPress. So, there are a few options I can choose from: Use the WordPress blog home page as my home page and modify…
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Growing a website – Day 6
Aiming for this structure for my “typical” website:- Updatable home page – top level Other “static” pages such as about, contact, links, services – these are the second level items Perhaps some sub-pages to the static pages, such as detail about individual services – these would be third level Blog – also a second level…
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Growing a website – day 5
If you have been following these posts, you’ll have seen that my home page has looked rather fragmented for a day. I have been experimenting with the layout:- copying a theme and then modifying it for my own use creating a new home page template, based on the index page but modified creating a new footer creating a…
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Growing a website – day 4
Reading lots of the WordPress lessons and finding out how to do a few things as I go. I’ve now made my Links page work by use of templates, enabled inclusion of email address without typing it in and discovered how to split a post.