Complex Page Layout (or not)

  • Hello guys,

    I’m making a complex layout (at least for me) in WP. What I want is a certain page as the homepage of WP. This page will have a custom template for managing this:

    1. The current page content. It’s the blurb for what the client is selling.
    2. Featured Work. It’s a post from a certain cat (say, cat 3). I will just load the excerpt of the post, that field will contain a little thumb of the project, the title and description.
    3. Blog. All posts from a certain cat, say, cat 5.
    4. Sections for that specific page. I’m thinking on implementing sub pages for this; i.e. say, a “home page” could contain subsections (subpages) like “contact-us” “request a quote”, etc., whatever the client needs. So, if the client needs a new page, say, “about”, he does it. If he needs section for that page, he will make a sub-page of “about”. The “about” page then, should load the contents of the page and its subpages in the sidebar (disregarding how many sub-pages he could have, the sidebar for each page should show all sub-pages for that specific page).

    Here’s a mockup of the site layout: https://img364.imageshack.us/img364/611/37341435oo8.gif

    Since I’m a designer I found this a bit tricky to do. I can do the 1, 2 and 3, but don’t know how to reuse the $wp_query object (that should be stored in a temp variable while doing the loop for the page I think) to show the content for each sub-page. I know I could do this knowing the page number in each template file and doing a query_post(), but the idea is to let client add/delete pages on the fly while in the WP admin.

    Any ideas? I love WordPress and I’m starting to using it as a CMS … but this exceeds me ??

    Thanks!

    Rodrigo

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • First off, I’d create a home.php and drop it in your directory. This will give you a specialized homepage without disrupting the rest of the site. Then, I’d use custom queries instead of the traditional loop for each sections…something like this:

    <?php $my_query = new WP_Query(‘cat=1’);
    while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();?>

    // Your Loop Here

    <?php endwhile; ?>

    Thread Starter rodrigogalindez

    (@rodrigogalindez)

    Hey Ryan,

    Thanks. I’m using a custom template page as you suggesting, and so far it works nice.

    Lastly I used custom fields and a hack for get_custom fields so it displays all the custom fields but not the _wp_page_template.

    It works by now.

    Thanks!

    Okay, so I have done a fair amount of configuring and customizing/editing templates and yet this thread just goes right over my head. I have read the general documentation and would like to understand or find a complete tutorial on what you described above as the fix.

    Are there tutorials that exist on this topic of subpage, query within specialized home page customization??

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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