WordPress as a CMS ? Not without ready made page templates!

  • Everywhere I go, I find someone else touting how WordPress has become a full website Content Management System (CMS). The reason is that it’s now easy to set up a static home page with the blog as a menu bar selection but, unless you want the static Home page, About page and any other non blog pages to look exactly like the Blog itself, you are going to have use Page Templates. Changing them is also easy to do. A Page Template can be designed with its own style and content while using whatever WordPress elements are appropriate, Header, Footer, Content are appropriate for the purpose. Or a whole page can be designed that contains it’s own content and ignores the WordPress content altogether.

    The average user has a problem because with this because while there are bazillions of WordPress themes, plugins and styles available, there seems to be no ready made page templates even for the most simple requirements. Example: A WordPress user wants to make a home page without a sidebar where the content window is the full width of the page. He wants to “Write” and “Manage” the content using WordPress…as a CMS! All he needs is a simple template that can be uploaded and some instructions for editing CSS that correspond to his theme and style. I can’t find any Page Templates out there that are ready to do this, whether the requirement is simple or sophisticated.

    WordPress wouldn’t be a blogging platform if there weren’t any Themes. It has become a great platform because of the availability of custom Themes, Styles and Plugins. How can it be a great CMS without any available custom Page Templates?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • I agree that it would be nice if themes came with a variety of page templates, but how hard is it to delete the get sidebar command? One of the first things I learned to do as a complete noob was create new page templates, and all the information you need is in the codex. This is not a major problem in my opinion.

    WordPress wouldn’t be a blogging platform if there weren’t any Themes. It has become a great platform because of the availability of custom Themes, Styles and Plugins.

    That’s true. The only missing point: all that (themes, plugins etc.) were made by volunteers, who decided to make their work freely available for all the WP users.

    How can it be a great CMS without any available custom Page Templates?

    If it really bothers you… maybe you can start creating special, custom Page templates for the zillions of themes out there.

    From what little I have gleamed thus far about WordPress, it should be possible to craft this CMS – like app:

    I have a book I want to publish that covers four topics, topic1-topic4, and within each topic there are many nested pages. By creating copies of page.php and changing them to topic1.php etc. and inserting at very top of the code <?php /* Template Name: topic3 */?>, for example, I can assign that file to a page I am writing in admin. That is covered in codex https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Pages

    As I see it, I could have a front page with a navbar showing these four topic buttons that link to any given topic and produce the page for it. There are plugins that allow ordering these pages and create a TOC from which I could select what to read. One of them relies on the font sizes h2, h3 and h4 to define what is a parent and what is a child or grandchild, although personally I don’t know how to set these h-sizes while writing.

    Finally, I can imagine that I could also create four headers, header 1 through header 4, and hard-code into each the topic name and also its tagline or sub-title, and make a pag3.php file call for a header3 that matches this simulated ‘category’.

    If the above is doable, I would certainly welcome it if someone could offer details about the fontsize h and how to set it and how to write the topic header and subtitle into the header code.

    Any volunteers? Eternal gratitude would be yours!

    Page3.php and header3.php would be the set – different from how I wrote the above. Sorry.

    endloser

    (@endloser)

    I totally agree with Rick.

    I am using a couple of different themes on various blogs, and am dying to have static page templates without a sidebar with the main content spanning 100%.

    I’m not a CSS expert and tried doing what I thought I needed to, removing the sidebar (works fine) then trying to create classes to get the entries on those pages to span. Can’t figure it out.

    I’m going to have to hire developers to do it probably. Of course if you’re a developer you’re probably thinking I should pay someone ?? But it would be so amazing if someone wrote exact documentation on how to do this.

    I keep searching hoping to find a post that documents what I described but have yet to find one.

    In fact I had asked that question here:
    https://cutline.tubetorial.com/forums/topic/create-new-page-without-sidebar

    Thanks for any help and if you do write a post somewhere please post the URL here. I’m willing to try to keep learning ??

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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