Why is is_home not working?

And what did you find when reading the documentation about the conditional tags?
Conditional_Tags#The_Front_Page

And what did you find when reading the documentation about the conditional tags?

I find that the exact tag I need doesn’t exist until version 2.5, and our site uses 2.2.2 for a number of very specific reasons.

Any other way to positively identify the default page?

Yep, is_home() doesnt seem to work when home is set to a static page. I tested this on 2.2

Tried a few other things which didn’t work either. I think you might want to consider parsing out the URL and displaying your ads based on what the url looks like. For example using something like:

$url_vars = explode("/",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

and then testing the parts of the url that make sense for your domain using

if($url_vars[1] == "something"){
}
else{
}

the number in $url_vars[#] refers to roughly to parts of the url seperated by a / depending on your url this may by something other then 1.

I feel like that’s getting close, but now it’s recognizing every page as the front page. Our WP install exists within a subdirectory called CMS, so the home page is https://www.mydomain.com/CMS. When I test for if $url_vars[2} == CMS, it returns true no matter what page I’m on.

I’ve tried this:

<?php

$url_vars = explode("/",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

if($url_vars[2] == "/CMS" || $url_vars[3] == ""){
	include('tiles_front.inc.php');
} else {
	include('tiles_default.inc.php');
}	

?>

but that fails too, returning the tiles_front include for every page and post on the site.

??

of course it does… you’re using the logical OR (||) instead of AND (&&)

you want both those conditions to be true, so you want AND not OR.

Doh, yes, right … but even with &&, it’s returning tiles_front on every page, including the front page. So something else is wrong in there, too.

This is working for my test install of 2.2

if(!$url_vars[2]){
    echo "home";
} else {
    echo "not home";
}

sounds like yours needs to be !$url_vars[3]

wpcast, that’s now showing the homepage include on every page, not just the home page …

GRR! Thanks so much for helping with this … I’m really grateful.

i would echo out some test text with the different vars to see which one comes up empty on home and populated on other pages.

<?php
$num = 0;
foreach ($url_vars as $var){
 echo "$num : $var <br />";
 $num++;
}
?>

Put this is the sidebar and test out your navigation watching the output to see which number is empty on the homepage but populated on non homepages. Thats the number you need to put in $url_vars[ here ]

Since I didn’t want to use a static page as my front page for one WordPress site, I instead used a modified version of index.php for the front page and created template files for every other type of web page on my blog so index.php is only used for the front page. You may wish to consider this as an option if you can’t get your current setup to work.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Templates_Hierarchy

wpcast, no number is empty on the homepage but populated on non-homepages. The homepage returns this:

0 :
1 : index.php

Non-homepage return this:

0 :
1 : CMS
2 : index.php?p=27309

Any ideas?

Nevermind, I figured out a solution – just a brute force comparison to the URL:

<?php

$url_test = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

if($url_test == "/index.php" || $url_test == "/CMS/index.php"){
	include('tiles_front.inc.php');
} else {
	include('tiles_default.inc.php');
}	

?>

While testing, just echo the value of $url_test in your sidebar, then you can make an endless series of elseifs to create separate sidebars for any specific page or post, including the front page.

So glad you got this working jbickers!