‘Input file not specified’ confusion

  • Hi
    I’m a first time user and finding it a little tricky to get my head around modifying WordPress for my website.

    One thing that confuses me is that I can’t upload a new page in the themes directory that will work. For example, if I create a copy of ‘index.php’ and call it ‘news.php’, and then link to it from the homepage, instead of going to news.php I get a message saying ‘input file not specified’.

    What I’m trying to do is create a News Archive page that can be linked to from the navigation bar, basically.

    On another note, is it possible to create a few different ‘sidebar.php’ pages? eg ‘sidebar1.php’, ‘sidebar2.php’, so I can refer to different configurations of the sidebar? (ie the sidebar would be different on the home page than it would be on the Archive page)

    Coming from a Movable Type background, where I just modify templates, I’m finding it difficult to understand the WordPress paradigm!

    Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

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

  • To have a visual “picture” how the template files of a theme work together, you may want to visit my visual anatomy of a theme.
    If your want to create a new Page template you should visit the link and read about the Page Templates.
    If you create a category called “news” and you file all your news under that category, WP creates automatically a link in the sidebar that will take you to just that category’s “archive”.
    Furthermore you can have a different look for that category by creating a category template.

    And finally, yes, you can have more sidebars or, depending on your PHP skills, you can just include if statement in the sidebar to show different content for different parts of your blog. See: Conditional_Tags

    Thread Starter unihead

    (@unihead)

    Thanks. Guess I’m trying to do this from a MT perspective and it just doesn’t work that way here.

    I tried creating a different sidebar file called ‘homesidebar.php’ then used the following in my index page:

    <?php get_homesidebar(); ?>

    But no luck. Not doing this right am I?

    No, since there’s no such PHP function. You’ll need to include the file.

    require(TEMPLATEPATH . '/homesidebar.php');

    TEMPLATEPATH is a constant defined by WP.

    Thread Starter unihead

    (@unihead)

    Thanks for your help with this!

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