Ok, hm, Beyond messed up, haha — RSS Feed, feed doesn't exist?

Where did you download this plugin from?

https://www.intmath.com/blog/adding-feeds-with-cg-feedread-a-tutorial/213

This. The site itself is not a WP site, it’s HTML/CSS currently because of deadlines for my employer. As I said, my goal is to have a .php page in the root directory, pull from the blog directory. I’m willing to do anything time-wise to solve the issue. As of now, we have less than 100 pages so, while tedious, I’d be willing to convert EVERYTHING over to .php if I have to.

And apparently, that CG-Feedread isn’t a WP plug-in but simply a server-side plug-in to bridge your site with WP? Am I understanding that correctly?

Correct – it’s not a WordPress plugin and will (almost certainly) not work on a WordPress site until it is turned into a plugin. Are you perhaps looking to integrate WordPress with your web site?

I am, and I’ve been through that link, as well as most threads in these forums and I still was unable to get it work properly.

As other forum threads have attempted to figure out (to success, unlike me, lol), I am looking for the pages talking about pulling the header and using the loop, to be one, singular page in my root directory (a .php page, of course) and to pull from said wordpress and said database in the blog folder. I’ve set all that up all ready.

I tried a custom theme as suggested in other threads and that butchered it even more.

The CG-Feedread is merely php scripting for a php page to pull from the wordpress database using similar functions and retrievals. It actually showed up on my site no problem at first but then I experienced the issue that led me to creating this thread:

I have no idea, any longer, how to access my blog or its feed and why posts I’ve created don’t show up (just a blank page) or it links back to my index. I’ve gone through Feed Validators, and tried going right to the feed URL’s, and it says the feed doesn’t exist. It’s like it is not installed. But as I said, I’m able to log in, I reinstalled the default theme, I’m able to create posts; all the normal WP functions.

For the TLDR; CG-Feedread seems like it will work if my blog and feed appeared to exist. I’d be happy to use the Loop and Grab Header, if I can simply put that on my singular blog.php page and have it pull from the wordpress installed/SQL database on the server.

Thanks for the reply, esmi.

Can you clarify exactly what it is that you are trying to do?

Sure.

Ok, so much like other threads and the logic behind that link you shared with me, I’m looking to have a a .php website page “be” the company’s blog, but the .php page have the same header, footer, and layout of the rest of the website (Ie., Use the blog.html page as the shell, as blog.php, and the content in the body, display the blog posts).

Theoretically, I should be to simply ‘Grab the header’ like in the link, paste it into the top of my blog.php file, have a loop in the body where I desire the content, make sure the header feeds from the appropriate path to the appropriate folders, and be good to go, correct? At least that is what I gleam is the goal from that link.

Assuming that you want the single Posts to continue to reflect the corporate design of the main site, what you effectively need to do is create a new custom theme based on your existing main site’s design. That’s going to take a bit more than just dropping in the header, footer etc markup.

integrating WordPress with your web site does explain how you can pull unstyled posts from your WP site into your main site (presumably using your blog.php page) and then style theme using your main site/s CSS. The problem with this technique, however, is that, whilst it’s pretty easy, as soon as you drill down into single Posts, you start losing that seamless design skin and you revert back to whatever theme you are actually using in the WP install.

I’d argue that the best way to proceed to to use a decent starter theme (like https://www.ads-software.com/themes/toolbox ) and use it to create your own theme that matches your main site.

Following that path of creating a custom theme, what are the steps? Is there a useful link? Looking at the bottom of the ‘Integrating…’ link, I followed it over to ‘Theme Development’ and now I’m a bit more confused than I was before, haha.

All that said, and as helpful as the links are esmi, it still doesn’t solve my one, most pressing issue; I can’t seem to find a way to access my blog outside of the wp-admin, despite it being installed and having at least one post, so regardless of the route I have to go to make it look like my corporate site, I don’t want to put in that amount of time if there’s a deeper error here.

it still doesn’t solve my one, most pressing issue; I can’t seem to find a way to access my blog outside of the wp-admin

Sorry – I missed that bit…

Have you tried:

– deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).

– switching to the default theme to rule out any theme-specific problems.

– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems.

– re-uploading all files & folders – except the wp-content folder – from a fresh download of your current version of WordPress. Make sure that you delete the old copies of files & folder before uploading the new ones.

– I have no plug-ins installed

– I have deleted the previously attempted custom theme and defaulted back to twentytwelve

– I have done two, wipe everything in my blog folder and re-download, re-installs, and still nothing. I’ll go back to www.ads-software.com, re-download WP, I’ll delete everything off of the server except the content folder this time, and re-install everything else, again.

ok,

https://www.lifline.com/blog/

We at least have stuff showing up now! Haha. So I thank you for that esmi. Now, I actually like this layout enough that messing with the colors and styles for this shouldn’t be too bad (I can probably copy over my normal style sheet). It’s not even so much that I need the whole page to look like the corporate site, really, I just need to be able to include the main site header with the logo & telephone number, the drop down navigation, and the footer. My site’s header and footer can wrap around everything WP shows, that won’t be a problem, if it’s possible; I’d just like to really be able to use the top and bottom “shell” of the corporate site.

Glad to hear that you’re making progress. ??

Before you start editing that theme, create a child theme for your changes. Or install a custom CSS plugin.

Ok, let me see if I am moving in the right direction with what I’m looking to do, with your suggestions:

– I follow either the child them directions or custom CSS plug-in.

– Considering I’m looking to do this for simply the blog, I can theoretically create just 1 template/theme, correct? I believe this is the point where I got all messed up the first time; applying the php scripting and headings correctly.

With the theme, what more do I need to do than just the index, header, footer? Also, does each .php file need that ‘Grab a header?’ I think that’s where I went down the wrong path initially; I was just throwing the php header everywhere.

Esmi, thanks for your help.

I follow either the child them directions or custom CSS plug-in.

Yes – otherwise your changes will be over-written when you update the theme.

I can theoretically create just 1 template/theme, correct?

In theory, yes. You can have a theme with just a single index.php template file. but in practice, this rarely works as different things tend to be wanted on different kinds of pages – eg. comments & a comment form are needed on a single Post but not on an archive (post listing) page. In order to pull this off in a single template theme, you’d need to use lots of conditional blocks that could quickly make the file’s code difficult to follow. Believe it or not, multi-file themes are often a lot easier to wrangle.

does each .php file need that ‘Grab a header?’

In general, the only template file that would not need a get_header() line would be sidebar.php, comments.php and footer.php. That’s because these files are called into other template files using get_sidebar(), wp_list_comments() and get_footer. The same would also go for any file that is called by get_tempate_part().

So, for the theme, I would need to have custom comment files, the sidebar thing, etc.? Within those files, what goes in for mark-up in terms of HTML to mimic my main site?

Where I got messed up before, attempting to follow the original Integrating WordPress link, I got all the way to the custom theme part, followed some threads in creating the header.php with the header coding, and the ‘head’ section of my template html page for my corporate design; I did the same with the index — with the body of my template html filling out this page with the php coding above it. Was that somewhat down the right path?

I think ran into some big problems by not changing the URI information and stuff at the top of the custom style sheet…