A bit of a peculiar template request

  • A friend of mine is running a wordpress based blog which can be found here – https://gordonkelly.com/

    He bought his current template, but it’s a bit out of date and he wants to make a few changes to his blog.
    I’ve helped him set up his current blog, but I have to admit that I’m far from a seasoned coder, but I’ve managed to customize his current template somewhat.

    Now for the complicated part. As you can see, the template he’s using is divided up into three sections, one for each of his content categories. This is one of his requirements for a new template and in fact, he’d like to add a fourth.
    I have no idea how to make this work and there doesn’t seem to be any simple way to tweak any standard template to display the content the way he has it, or at least non that I have found.

    So any ideas/suggestions on a free template that could be tweaked into doing what he needs would be great, or even a pointer to a similar template that would be available for purchase, as the company that made his current template don’t offer any updated versions and the current version is getting a bit tricky to use with newer versions of wordpress as it lacks a lot of customization features that more modern templates tend to feature among many things.

    Cheers

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  • I am a big fan of creating child themes based on the default themes in WordPress; e.g., twenty-ten, twenty-eleven, and the soon-to-be-out twenty-twelve. That way, you benefit from the updates to the default themes and can still tweak to your heart’s content as well as make all kinds of CSS changes in the child theme’s own style.css.

    It’s hard for me to understand why your friend wants the layout that he does, rather than having his most recent posts from whatever category displayed on the home page and leaving the categories to display together elsewhere on category pages. It seems like it would create a much less busy front page and be better for SEO. However, mine is not to reason why.

    If you were going to use twenty-ten, say, which has the sidebar widgets on every page like your friend’s blog, you would copy the index.php from the twenty-ten theme into the folder for your child theme. You could then edit the “content” div of the index.php script in your child theme folder to display the posts by category in each section you create using whatever layout you want.

    Thread Starter thelostswede

    (@thelostswede)

    I have no idea as to why he wants it that way, but he’s very peculiar about his different sections being posted in different categories on the front page.

    Sadly I’m not enough of a programmer to create a custom theme for him, hence why I was asking for something a bit more up-to-date that is similar to what he’s already got.

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