Custom Home Page Troubles...

[davemcnally]

I am currently working on the WP theme for my new site and I am using a custom home page. I was wondering if there were any plugins to make this simple?

At the moment, my custom page is pulling in the sidebar etc when I dont want it on there but I presume if I take out the include for the sidebar from the index template it would strip it all together and I want it displayed on the blog page...

Confusing stuff!

[davemcnally]

Nevermind...looks like I chose the wrong option to start with. Initially, I created a page through the dashboard and set it to display that static page first.

Now, I duplicated the default page.php, renamed it and removed the includes from there. All is working fine now.

[Jessi]

Good to see you got it worked out. :)

[SarahG]

Also, just to add for future reference, once you've stopped using the blog as your front page, your blog is only accessible via the categories or archives, both of which can be controlled away from index.php by category.php or archive.php (or maybe archives.php, I forget which). Unless of course you create your own page template and list the last X blog posts on it, to be like the front page of your blog would have been.

Simply put, your entire theme can run on index.php however each section looks for its own page first before defaulting to index.php so you have single.php for a single blog post, category.php, archive(s).php, page.php and then index.php.

[davemcnally]

Also, just to add for future reference, once you've stopped using the blog as your front page, your blog is only accessible via the categories or archives, both of which can be controlled away from index.php by category.php or archive.php (or maybe archives.php, I forget which). Unless of course you create your own page template and list the last X blog posts on it, to be like the front page of your blog would have been.

Simply put, your entire theme can run on index.php however each section looks for its own page first before defaulting to index.php so you have single.php for a single blog post, category.php, archive(s).php, page.php and then index.php.

I was getting confused by the whole 'page/1/' thing to find the blog page and now I'm just even more confused!

I did the custom page thing to work but it's not working out as I expected, I may just adapt the blog homepage for now and have done with these troubles. Something I can always look into at a future date but at the moment, I have so many projects going and I need to start wrapping this one up..

[SarahG]

I did the custom page thing to work but it's not working out as I expected

What did you do and what exactly are you trying to achieve? From your first post you want your front page of your site to display differently from the rest of the site, so it doesn't have a sidebar. But what about internal pages and posts. Should the pages have the sidebar as well as the posts, or just the posts?

[SageMother]

If you look at wordpress.org, you might find some plugins that will help out. Also look at other blogs on blogging to find hints and tricks.

[davemcnally]

I was trying a certain approach to a custom home page so I would have a featured article with some recent ones listed.

But I realised this was easy enough to do by simply editing some stuff in wordpress and I didn't need to custom page I was working on. Thanks for the help all the same :)