Stripping out blog-related stuff

  • Apologies if this has come up before. I can’t believe it hasn’t, yet I’ve been through a host of posts and searched the forums with no joy.

    I’ve made a website as a shop window for my PR services: https://www.mikehutchinson.org.uk. It’s OK as it stands, but what I want to do now is to strip out anything that betrays the site’s “blog origins”.

    That means, on the front page, deleting “categories”, “Post a comment…”, “Feeds”, “Archives”, “Meta”, all that stuff. It must be possible, because I’ve seen WordPress-based websites without it.

    Erm, the other thing to say is that I’m not at all teccie. I have found an article on the web that gives quite useful advice but it concentrates on stripping out code, and I’m very nervous of that.

    “Delete php files named…” is not so much beyond me as scary.

    Any suggestions? I’ve tried to deactivate the “categories” widget – if that’s one answer – but the whole “drop here to deactivate” thing just doesn’t seem to work. Is that a glitch I can sort?

    Advice welcomed. But please keep it simple. I really have very limited technical ability. I much prefer instructions to “click these keys” rather than “it’s easy, you just ameleorate the knarglefurzel spogs”.

    Any general comments on the site would be welcome, too.

    By the way, could the kind geniuses at WordPress come up with a WordPress [Website Version], where all this kind of thing is pre-set?

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • Well no, the knarglefurzel spogs aren’t an issue this time. I do think that you are going to have to remove some code/files though. I suspect that your sidebar isn’t going to go away without a fight. It looks like you know how to remove widgets but you still see a sidebar, which means that WP is falling back on a static sidebar, a hard-coded sidebar. If you look in your theme you’ll see a file named sidebar.php. I checked already. You have one. You can rename that to something like dontusethis_sidebar.php and the sidebar should go away. However, not knowing how that sidebar is coded I can’t guarantee that that will be the end of it. You may have layout problems. You are probably better off finding the sidebar’s dynamic_sidebar call and removing that. So do this: Look in header.php and in footer.php for the dynamic_sidebar function and post about ten lines above and below it. Be sure to use the ‘code’ button above or the code won’t post correctly.

    Thread Starter mikethutchinson

    (@mikethutchinson)

    Thanks for this. As you can tell, if code is poetry it’s not stuff I understand. (The “code less travelled”? Hm.) But I’ll have a go.

    Thing is, it isn’t the whole of the sidebar I want to remove. I want to keep the search function, the list of pages and the links. Is there a way to remove the other stuff (as above) without tampering with code?

    Erm, the other thing is, how do I “look in header.php”? I did it once, but that was before Christmas and I’ve forgotten since… I did mention I was not techie…

    Whatever I do in the end, if I bungle it, is there an equivalent of the “undo typing” in Word that restores what you just deleted?

    Thing is, it isn’t the whole of the sidebar I want to remove. I want to keep the search function, the list of pages and the links. Is there a way to remove the other stuff (as above) without tampering with code?

    This is easier, hopefully. You are usually able to drag the widgets you want into the sidebar from the wp-admin->Appearance->Widgets control panel and overwrite the static sidebar. Have you tried that?

    Whatever I do in the end, if I bungle it, is there an equivalent of the “undo typing” in Word that restores what you just deleted?

    No. There is no ‘undo’. Make a backup of anything you edit and you’ll be fine. And do not edit in something like Word. Use a text editor like PSPad or Text Wrangler.

    Thread Starter mikethutchinson

    (@mikethutchinson)

    That’s what’s so odd. I’ve been dragging and dropping widgets exactly as you say and nothing happens. I’ve seen all the forum chat claiming the problem’s connected to plug-ins, but I only have two – Fast and Secure Contact Form and WordPress Database Backup. They seem so popular the problem can’t be connected with them. I drag and drop search, pages and links into the Sidebar 1 slot, visit my site, and nothing’s changed. Feeds, archives, categories, meta – all the things I don’t want are still there. When I return to the widget admin page, there’s nothing in the Sidebar 1 slot.

    Is there an equivalent of the “publish” confirmation button that I should be pressing? What do you make of this?

    As I mentioned above I’ve got an automatic database backup. If it comes to it, can I use Notepad to edit? Is that like PSPad or Text Wrangler?

    If the sidebar isn’t going away the problem is most likely in the theme. It sounds like you’ve got a static sidebar, or sidebar components, hard-coded into the theme. You will have to edit code to get rid of it. Go back up and read my first response to you.

    You can use Notepad, but with PSPad you’ll get syntax highlighting which is indescribably useful.

    Thread Starter mikethutchinson

    (@mikethutchinson)

    So could I change the theme and would that solve the problem?

    Ironically this theme is promoted on the basis that it is “designed to make your content the focus”…

    So could I change the theme and would that solve the problem?

    Maybe. It depends on the theme really.

    If you really like your theme I’m sure this is fixable. If that is a free theme I could download it and take a look but it will have to wait until I have a few minutes.

    I was working on accomplishing the same thing… converting a web 2.0 blog into a web 1.0 “website”. It involves some code editing.

    You might want to check out the demo at https://wp.informationpile.com/

    I had modified the Arclite theme by Digital Nature…

    I am still working on it… the biggest problem being 301 redirecting hundreds of already indexed pages from the old website to the new blog…

    Thread Starter mikethutchinson

    (@mikethutchinson)

    Apologies for the delay, but OK – sorted. Many thanks for your help.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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