I am working on a WordPress theme that was made by someone before me. The website is for a band, and if you want to see the releases of the band the URL is in this format:
www.domain.com/band/[bandname]/releases/
I am now trying to make a subsection with details of each release. The links from the overview of releases now works, and when the users click the link they get to the URL:
www.domain.com/band/releases/[name-of-release]
The releases are custom post types created with "More Types", and the child content are made with fake pages. A template seems to be loaded based on the slug/page the user is visiting. This is for the 'releases' page:
if ($current == 'releases') {
get_template_part( 'single', 'band-releases' );
}
I have made a template for showing an individual release as well, but how can I get template based on its slug as it will be dynamic (several releases)?
If it's a custom post type, the template that displays the individual releases (www.domain.com/releases/[name-of-release]) is single.php.
The template single.php will also be used to display all individual posts. If you want a template that is just for the releases, create a file called single-releases.php (https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/basics/template-hierarchy/#single-post).
If you name your templates properly, WP will know which template goes with which content.
Related
New to WordPress theme design, and my google searching is not returning what I am after.
I have a theme I have created and its fine, but the text is all hardcoded into the theme.
I want there to be options in the theme appearance settings? (right place?) where a user can e.g. enter their 'about us' text.
But I have no idea what I should be searching or how to pull in that information into my theme.
Im no a beginner to PHP, but just the way WordPress works itself.
A link, search term or quick start is all I need.
I think you might find the (Free) Advanced Custom Fields plugin useful: http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/
You can add unlimited custom fields and create user interfaces for non-technical people to add content to your theme without them touching any code.
If you set up a field named 'about_text', calling it in your theme would look like this:
<?php the_field('about_text'); ?>
First, you should learn how wordpress is working to display the content. In back office, under Settings > Reading you'll find an option that let you tell how you want Wordpress to deal with the front page : is it a listing of the posts, or a static page?
If you choose the first options, it will use the index.php template from your theme folder. If it's a static page, you'll have to select which page to use for displaying the home (a page you created under the Menu page). The template that will be use then is front-page.php.
For every post / page (page is a post_type, just a variation of post) there will be a title field, a wysiwyg content and a featured image which will be displayed in a template. That's all you can manage by default. To display the title you can use the_title, the content the_content and for the featured image you will need the_post_thumbnail - note that those functions will need to be used inside the loop.
In order to display some more fun, you have many tools at your disposal:
Widgets : widgets are displayed in a sidebar - don't take it literally, it's just a zone of your template. You can register a sidebar with register_sidebar (use this inside your functions.php file, within an init hook). Then in your template you can display the sidebar with dynamic_sidebar.
In WP back office, go then under Appearence > Widgets. You will find your brand new sidebar where you can put any kind of widget you want. If you need a wysiwyg widget, I recommend you to install the Black Studio TinyMCE widget.
Custom fields : any post_type (a post type is an entry in wp_posts) in Wordpress have some associated metas store in wp_postmeta. A meta is defined by a key and a value - it's like any post have an associated array that you can customize.
There is two ways to work with custom fields. First, you can use the default Wordpress feature: when editing a page, click on the screen options button on the top right and enable "custom fields". You will now have a new area to work with on the bottom of the page : you can add fields by name (by default it will list the existing fields names but you can add your own) and value. It's good enough to simple text fields. Then in your template, you can get that value with the get_post_meta function.
The other way is to use a custom fields plugin, which allow you to have wysiwyg fields, loops, media uploader, datepicker... Two popular plugins are Advanced Custom Fields and Custom Field Suite. They both allow you to easily create set of fields for any page / post_type from the back office, and provide their own functions to manipulate fields in templates (but you can still use the WP functions if you want). For example, to get a custom field with Custom Field Suite you do: CFS()->get('my_custom_field').
Custom Post Types : sometimes, custom fields and widgets are not really convenient when you deal with a lot of data with possibly associated pages. In that cases, you can create your own post types just like posts or pages, but you can define which capabilities they have. Use register_post_type to define your new post type (still in init hook), that will make a new section available in your back office, just like posts. Then in your template you can query them with get_posts, the WP function that you will probably the most use when you'll start to play with Wordpress. I suggest you to read the WP_Query documentation in order to learn more about it.
And, at last but not least, you can create your own template that you can associate with any pages. For that, create a php file named whatever you want in your theme folder, paste into it the content from page.php and add this PHP comment on top :
/*
Template Name: My Template
*/
Then choose this template in the dropdown when you edit a page (on the right sidebar).
I think you will have enough to play with, but if you want learn more I recommend you to read about Wordpress hooks and the Widget API to create your own widgets.
Have fun with Wordpress!
It has been a few years since I properly worked with WordPress. Now I have a proposal to build a WordPress site where every page has a custom design and only some areas of each page is editable.
The reason for this is to build a bespoke layout on each page which cannot be messed up by someone non-technical editing it in the CMS, except for small areas which they can customise.
e.g. A page contains one div which has some text in it, which can be edited in the WP admin backend, but the rest of the page cannot be edited.
Can this be done? How?
Edit: There needs to be multiple editable areas not just one. I know how to make custom pages/templates.
One method may be to create new page templates. Just create a new file in your main theme folder (or the templates folder if there is one). As long at the top of that file contains the line:
/*
Template Name: <your template name>
*/
You can design the page however you want. The data pulled from the admin section will go wherever you invoke
the_content();
The rest of the page can be hardcoded.
Then on the post edit page, on the right side (usually), you can choose the template with your template name for that page. It may be a good idea to copy the current post.php or single.php into your custom file and work from there.
For restricting access you can look at setting up user levels and keep your content contributors as "Authors" instead of "admins" so they can't change themes or edit settings.
(See https://codex.wordpress.org/User_Levels)
For creating specific unique pages with an area that gets changed you should look into custom Page Templates. You can create a page template by dropping a php file with the right naming structure into your theme hierarchy and it will get picked up by the back-end as template option when you create a page.
(See https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/template-files-section/page-template-files/page-templates/)
I solved this problem using a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields which does exactly what I required.
I'm stuck on this issue with my Wordpress setup. My current setup is as follows: I have a custom post type "degrees" that are categorized by undergraduate, graduate, online, and abroad. The initial page is a specific taxonomy template I have set up for the user to specify which degrees to look through. Once a category is selected, the user will come to a landing page with all graduate programs, etc. This page is handled in the backend as a archive-degrees.php. Then, upon selecting a program, the template used is single-degrees.php. My problem is that I have one program (currently using the single-degress.php) that I would like to use the archive page as it needs to list out sub-programs. I hope that makes sense. Basically, I need this one specific Custom Post to use the archive page and then the single page for its sub-children. I am not sure if there is a way to do this. Any help will be much appreciated.
You're referring to specialized page templates. Your best bet is to create a new template for this page specifically.
From the Codex:
Create a template for one Page: For more extensive changes, intended for just one specific Page, you can create a specialized template file, named with that Page's slug or ID:
page-{slug}.php
page-{ID}.php
For example: Your About page has a slug of 'about' and an ID of 6. If your active Theme's folder has a file named page-about.php or page-6.php, then WordPress will automatically find and use that file to render the About page
I am currently teaching myself WordPress and working on my own CMS site.
My site will consist of approximately five pages where the header/sidebar menu/footer will be seen on all these five pages.
Beginner here and questions are as follows:
All these five pages will consist of different content, for example, every page will have a image banner representing the menu option just clicked, for example, "About Us" on page 5, "Promotions" on page 4 etc and then some text beneath that and then possibly some images inside a carousel set up.
Within WordPress, how would I tackle this, i.e. do I just create a page in WordPress, position the banner image at the top of the page, then have a few breaks and then insert the carousel of images - is this correct?
If not, do I need to create a separate php file called aboutUs.php that has this markup and then somehow link it to a WordPress page?
On my landing page of my site ONLY (page 1), just above the footer, I want to display a div section that displays all the sponsors of the website along with a URL to click to their websites - how would I go about doing this in WordPress?
Furthermore, with my menu, how do I link my menus to point to the WordPress pages relating to that menu option?
If you use the 'default' template that comes with WordPress you could do something like this to generate different content on different pages without creating separate php files (this would go in page.php):
<?php if(is_page('About Us')) { ?>
<?php $about_query = new WP_Query('category_name=aboutus-&showposts=1');
while ($about_query->have_posts()) : $about_query->the_post(); ?>
<?php the_content();?>
<?php endwhile;?>
Essentially, in this you could just create a post and an 'aboutus' category to reference it. The page of 'About Us' (referenced through is_page()) would contain the content you wanted to display.
First, some background. Wordpress has a number of ways to display stuff, such as images, text, and query results; here's a list:
THEMES
You can modify your theme files directly to do whatever you like. This will probably involve learning a lot about PHP and the Wordpress internals, but there are plenty of books, and the Wordpress Codex to help you. You can get themes from the Wordpress theme directory.
PLUGINS
There are huge numbers of Wordpress plugins, any one of which might fit your need. Plugins will require configuration, but generally won't involve learning PHP -- just how to install and configure them. Most of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugins will allow you to place custom HTML in the templates (nominally for ad placement, but you can do anything you want with it). You can get plugins from the Wordpress plugin directory.
WIDGETS
The base Wordpress software and many plugins provide Widgets. A widget is a display element that can be docked in one or more widget areas. Typically a widget will be a chunk of HTML (often an unordered list) that has the theme's style sheet applied. Widgets are often used for ad placement, navigation elements (menus, dropdowns, breadcrumbs) or to provide tag clouds, category lists, calendars, etc.
SHORTCODE
A shortcode is a macro that can be placed in a page or post, that will return a chunk of HTML. Shortcodes can take parameters that will affect what the shortcode returns. The base Wordpress software provides some shortcodes, but many plugins will provide shortcodes as a way to get more functionality without the need for widgets or theme modifications.
With all of that in mind, here's my answer(s) to your question(s):
Modify your theme to include a page template, and add your image selection code to the template. Then create your individual pages, and then select your template while editing the page.
The 'landing page' can be any page (instead of the default blog index page); create a 'home' page and a 'home' page template that includes your advertisements. Alternately, use a SEO plugin to add the ads above the footer.
I don't know what theme or plugins you use, but generally you can configure a navigation menu to work from a list of pages, specifying either which pages to include or which pages to exclude. If your theme doesn't include this functionality, I'd recommend choosing a different theme.
Look into Wordpress "page templates". The Wordpress codex can help you understand this.
If you edit a post in WP you will notice the option to use a template. That is your goal. Learn how to work with them.
Wordpress themes are composed of multiple files. One of them is the header.php file which contains the header content. The footer.php file contains the footer and the sidebar.php contains the sidebar. These are the usual conventions. They're not strict. There will be a couple of main files which include these (e.g., index.php - Used for articles, page.php - Used to display pages etc.)
If I were making a setup like yours, I'd make five "pages" (using the backend) and then customise my page.php file to present it properly. I'd still keep the header, footer and sidebar separate from the page.php file since they'd be there for pages like 404s etc. as well.
Just put something in the content of the landing page to display this.
IF you're doing theme development, the right place to look at is http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
I am trying to achieve a custom URL structure with Wordpress. Basically, my site functions as my blog and my portfolio. I want to have an "Articles" section and a "Portfolio" section. I want the articles to display on the Articles page, and the portfolio on the Portfolio page. Should be easy, except on top of that I want custom URLs...
I want the URLs setup like this:
Articles page:
http://mydomain.com/discusses
Specific article:
http://mydomain.com/discussed/%postname%
Portfolio page:
http://mydomain.com/does
Specific design:
http://mydomain.com/designed/%postname%
I can figure out how to do only one rewrite of this type, but WP doesn't have built in functionality to do both. I'm just wondering where I should start or what I should do...
The problem also becomes, I want to retain category functionality in both areas, so maybe it needs to be achieved with Custom Fields? and add a new rewrite rule based on the custom field of a post? I have idea where to start...
Thanks for any help you can give.
This actually isn't that hard to do. I'll go down, page by page, what you would need to do to achieve this.
Articles Page
Create a new template in your theme folder (/wp-content/themes/your-theme/) called discusses.php and just add the following content:
<?php
/*
Template Name: Discusses Template
*/
?>
You don't need any more content. Go into the Pages section of WordPress Admin and create a new page called Articles page and set the URL to be /discusses/. Set the template of this page to be Discusses Template. Now, go into the Settings → Reading section in Admin and set the Posts page to Articles page. Now all your blog posts will appear under the URL /discusses/
Specific Article
The easiest way to have all your articles appearing as /discussed/title is to rename the default category (in Posts → Categories) to discussed. Then set your permalinks to be:
/%category%/%postname%/
This will render the links you need for each post.
Portfolio Page & Specific Design Page
Assuming this will be some kind of custom design, the easiest thing to do would be to create a custom template and Page in the pages section, as you did for the articles page, and throw your custom HTML and CSS into that. I would then set each specific design page to be a child page of that in the pages section. You can use the WPdb classs to make custom queries to populate the Portfolio page.