In “How to use WP as a CMS Part 1″ I wrote about how to remove the double up effect of the menu/navigation
when you make a static page and select it to be the front page of the website.
Now I’m going to write about something so mindblowingly obvious that if you know this already you might just have a fit.
You don’t need a Posts page if you aren’t going to have any Posts!
In Options>Reading in the dashboard WordPress will ask you to select a Posts page.This can be confusing because you might not want a posts page at all.Because if you want to use WordPress as a CMS you might not need a blog. Case closed.
If you’ve created Pages to hold your site content but then selected one of them to be your posts page any content you used the WP editor to add into that page will now be skipped over in anticipation of displaying your posts.
Why is that? Because whatever you typed into the editor is displayed with the Loop and a Posts Page is for posts which is why the Loop asks
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
But in order to keep the CMS aspect of things you should design the home page to be editable with the WP editor.This will make it so that the end resulting page can be edited by the site owner without them having to go to their host control panel or use a text editor and FTP–which might frighten the pants off of them. I call it code shock.
In which those unused to looking at code will be so scared of it that they will be too afraid to touch anything resulting in a static site that never gets updated because they were afraid to update it.
The WP editor gets knocked a lot because of what it does to coder’s codes but it’s fine and dandy when used for what it was meant to be used for which is typing plain text into the textarea and uploading an image to be displayed in a post/page.
Which, let’s face it, are what sites are made of; images and text.You and I both think it’s as easy as pie to add text and images with a text editor and FTP. But your client hasn’t been studying HTML in their free time and may not know how to use FTP.
If you let the WP editor be the CMS they never have to look at code which means they will be 100% more likely to edit their own sites! And sites that get updated frequently keep us all happy.
In order to make a static home page and use the Loop you create a new document with Notepad and put this at the top of it:
<?php
/*
Template Name: Home Page
*/?>
Then copy the code in page.php and paste it after that and save it as homepage.php.
Then FTP it to your theme’s folder.
Go to Manage>Pages>Home and scroll down to the select box on the
left:
Default Template is selected, um by default, but now the template for the home page should also be there ready to get selected.
So now all that’s left to do is make sure the structure html of the document is laid out in the way you want the home page to look.With a few simple tweaks to the CSS it ought to be ready to go.
However,remember that changes made to the css will effect all the pages.
I’m not a PHP programmer so the way I deal with that is with includes.
In my next post I’ll show how the homepage.php can work to show static and dynamic content with a custom query.