leeland

hi there
i have recently used the default theme (kubrick) to make a small non blog site but modified it a fair bit so it doesn’t look very kubrick-ey
one problem with this theme was that it used images for it’s backgrounds and questions i posted to this forum elicited some “don’t ask me about altering kubrick” kind of replies
as for lots of php code, that’s not really an issue, you won’t be altering it just not using it
so … check a few themes before starting work, because the deeper you get into it the more reluctant you’ll be to start over
good luck!

thanks maerk
here’s the pastebin link for the working header.php file
https://pastebin.be/3024/

thanks maerk
sorry for the lag, i’ve been away
i can’t seem to get this preg_match to work at all
not sure what the problem is and can’t spend anymore time on it
sorry, i’m giving up and using an embarrassingly blunt list of possible ‘blues’ like this:


if(is_page('blue')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-2')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-3')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-4')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-5')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-6')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-7')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-8')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-9')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-10')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('blue-11')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else

i’m sure your stomach will turn when you see this
i’m totally embarrassed and hang my head in shame
o well
thanks for the generous help anyway
regards

you’re most patient maerk
this looks good, i’ll give your suggestion a go
it’s a pity, as i liked the way i could change the slug and not affect the page title, keeping the names of these pages more informative
thanks again!

hey thanks for that maerk,

yes i thought is_post was a string
if it’s a boolean, how come
if(is_page('blue-2')){echo "kubrickbgblue.jpg";} else
if(is_page('yellow')){echo "kubrickbgyellow.jpg";} else…
works?

i’ll check your link and keep on mulling

hi
me again
i have found a problem with the approach of using a post slug to identify which bg image to use in a page, namely that i can’t use the same slug twice. wordpress appends a hyphen and number, this kind of breaks the usefulness of this approach.

any ideas to get around this?

my thoughts are to have a wildcard in the code to ignore the hyphen and number, like

?>/images/<?php if(is_page('yellow'&&wildcardHere?)){echo 'kubrickbgYELLOW.jpg';} else


or to go with the custom page template approach i outlined in a previous post (which i have no idea how to do)

any thoughts anybody?
thanks

hi again
i see from the link you sent davedotcom that i can use the post slug as an identifier in the if(is_page("slug") and this seems to work just fine, i can have a bunch different page background colors, each asociated with a slug name, perfect.
thanks for the pointer.
i’m just wondering if using the slug this way could be a problem later on?

hi davedotcom
thanks for that, putting in a specific page id number certainly does successfully change the background image for the specified page
and i’ll start reading the conditional tags intro right now
but…
so the code would work with any number of pages, i’m wondering if rather than hard coding in every id number there’s a way of sending the header some other identifier associated with the assigned custom page template, which is the code for page.php with a template name added at the top.
does this approach make sense?


<?php
/*
Template Name: yellowtemplate
*/
?>
//maybe here add a yellow identifier to send to the header?
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>
<?php link_pages('<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', '</p>', 'number'); ?>
</div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>