Explain to a noob theme designer

  • I’ll start off saying I’m a noob. I’m creating a theme and I’m new to WordPress. I was hoping somebody could explain to me what I need to do to get some basic functionality together in my theme I’m creating.

    What I’m having a hard time figuring out how to work is getting new custom page to load in to my site.

    For example, right now all my pages look the same because footer and header are loading in. I have my html and css set up in my head and footer section. I have a dynamic nav working. Now I want the second link to be blog and I want to include everything that goes into my blog in the blog page. So what I did was created a new doc called blog.php, I added this to the header:

    <?php
    /*
    Template Name: Blog
    */
    ?>

    How do I get a new page like this to display when I click on blog?
    I googled this and got tons of tuts on how to create a custom page but found nothing about linking it.

    Can someone help me out?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • You simply assigh Blog as the template when you create the Page. Of course, you will need some code in the template before it will actually do anything.

    Thread Starter vdubplate

    (@vdubplate)

    I figured out what went wrong. I was using someones boilerplate blank theme and they for some reason killed that functionality.

    I do have another question if you don’t mind. Once I do get my custom pages to show up I noticed they aren’t able to be part of the dynamic menu flow. They get placed at the end of the nav. Do you know what I could do to fix that or what to search for for an explanation. Thanks again for the response.

    To have complete control over the menu, use the WP Menus created at Admin->Appearance->Menus. Here is a video tutorial

    If you don’t want to do that, there is an ‘Order’ parameter under ‘Page Attributes’ when creating or editing a Page. That number determines the menu order. I prefer the custom menus because of the number of Pages that I usually have on a site and the need to sometimes renumber to rearrange the menu with this method.

    Thread Starter vdubplate

    (@vdubplate)

    Thanks vtxyzzy,

    Ill take a look at that tutorial.
    From what you wrote it looks like I’m doing everything correctly I might have messed my code up somewhere. I brought in my html menu, killed out the Ul and Li tags added the menu in where you suggested and I was able to rearrange my nav. Everything was working fine.
    I then made my custom pages, changed the order parameter but those new pages still sit at the end of the page. I have to go back and reconstruct and see if I’m still having that issue.

    Thanks for the response. I’ll check that video now.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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