WordPress Templates

Changing the look of your WordPress website is extremely easy with the Theme Editor, and the great thing about WP templates is that they're PHP based. This might seem a bit unfriendly towards beginners, but it's great for us, because it means we have a lot to work with.

If you don't know anything about the WP template system, I highly suggest you play with it for a few hours. Get to know how it works and start learning some of the template tags. A great place to start is at the Codex, especially the Template Tags section.

A little know feature of the WP template system is that you can very easily add your own templates. Just create a new file with the following in it, and save it in your wp-content/theme/[theme name]/ folder.

If you now look in your theme editor your template should now appear in the templates list, and it's possible to create as many templates as you want.

Let's have a look at creating a custom template for a certain category. As we can read in the WP Codex for 'Category Templates', WP looks for a category template in the following order:

This means we can create a custom category template by creating a new template, saved as category-1.php (that would display a custom template for the category that belongs to categoryID 1). Copy the code below, and save it as category-1.php (or category-[another catid].php if you don't have a category with ID 1).

If you now go to the category page for that category, you will see your custom template. Using custom category templates is excellent way of creating separate sections in your WP website, and that's exactly how I've done it here on PHPit. Each section (articles, FAQ, code snippets and blog) is a separate category, and each has its own custom template.

You can also create a custom entry page for each category, but this is slightly trickier. In the next part of this tutorial, I will show you how to do this. Let's have a look at some problems that you may encounter when creating your WP website.

(Common) Problems

Your content gets all mangled
I had a problem whereby my content got all messed up, especially with regard to 'Writing'). Then you must disable the wptexturize filter, by using the remove_filter() function. Add the following to your Header template:

Now all formatting options are turned off, and you should no longer experience this problem. If you run a regular content website (e.g. no code in your posts and you don't use PHP Exec), you won't have to disable any formatting.

You want to import your old content
This can often be a problem, because the content of your website is still in your old CMS. If you're starting fresh with WP, you don't have to worry about this, but most of us don't, so you have to think about importing your old content.

For PHPit, I wrote a custom importer that directly imported the old content into the WP database. But this might not be possible for everyone, and you should consider using WordPress' inbuilt importers. Have a look on the Codex for Importing Content.

If you really can't do it automatically, you can either consider doing it yourself by hand (takes a lot of time!) or have someone else write you an importing script.

Conclusion

In this first part of the WordPress series, I have given you an introduction to WordPress plugins and templates, and you should now be able to write (simple) plugins yourself. The one thing I can highly suggest is to take a few hours, and simply play with WP. You will learn a lot that way, and gain much experience.

In the second, and final, part I will provide a complete guide on creating a simple website with WP. It will show you from beginning (installing WP) to end (being able to use your website) how to use WP as your content management system.

This article was posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2005 at 10:54 pm. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.