number cruncher

Thanks, I thought about that, but I find that looking at what I’ve written as it will really appear on the page helps me express myself more fully and more clearly, so I don’t think that’s going to work.

Another clarification (why can’t I edit my original post?!):

When I said ‘fixed,’ I didn’t mean that it used to be broken, I meant that it’s not going to change.

fixing typo at end: But if I then go and work on the local site without having updated it yet, I’m in trouble.

And I should add, in relation to the first paragraph: When I have the opportunity to update my live site, then I find it onerous to have to remember, and take the time, to copy the finished or partial product over to my local site. But if I then go and work on the local site without having updated in yet, I’m in trouble.

I’ve solved the immediate problem. The key was index.php. The sidebar line had been commented out, so I undid that, and the sidebar appeared.

I hardcoded the page title and introductory paragraph.

I still hope to learn how to trace through exactly which files are being used when visiting a particular page.

Thanks.

What I mean is, is there some way to check what files are actually being loaded, in other words: if I do View Source, I see the whole html. WordPress pieced that together from several separate files. Which ones? I don’t want to speculate, I want to verify. What is actually happening?

I suppose I could put a different debugging statement in each file in the theme folder, and then observe the results. But it would be nice to have a less tedious method.

Regarding the other part of your answer. Should I just copy the contents of page.php into index.php?

daysleeper, I see a potential problem: https://localhost etc. will only work on your local machine. This won’t work when you upload to the live site.

I like your goal of keeping things organized, however, I think you can keep things organized without using a separate stylesheet. I’ve seen many well-organized themes that put all the style rules in the regular style.css file. Suppose your theme is called shiftwork. Here’s where the stylesheet that wordpress automatically looks for is located:
(this is just the last part of the path) wp-content/themes/shiftwork/style.css
You can divide this file up into well marked sections, using comments and asterisks, and that should give you the organized feeling.

The beauty of this approach is that you can develop and modify your theme on your local installation, and upload it to the live site without having to change anything.

Hi Erik,

For the minor problem of the banner being a few pixels lower than you would like: I checked with firebug (I hope you are using this indispensable tool!), and found this: line 316 of style.css:
margin-top: 10px !important;
I tried changing the 10 to 0 and the banner moved up nicely.

I’ve got an alternative idea for you to try with your banner. But first — have I understood right? You would like a different banner image on each page? Nothing random? If so, why not insert the image in the admin page for the individual page? The beauty of header.php is that it gives you a consistent banner across all your pages, but that’s not what you want!

The only thing to be careful with for this approach would be to make sure that your navigation bar gets placed in the right place on the page. Firebug will help with that.

I see.

Thank you, Esmi.

I do — but I don’t think that resulted in multiple templates, did it? The only files I’ve modified are header.php, page.php, footer.php, style.css and functions.php. Everything else I’ve done via the admin panel.

Thanks! So if I’ve got a simple situation with no multiple templates, there’s nothing wrong with moving the header and footer stuff to page.php?

Have you checked with firebug? Select the part of the page that’s using styles different from what you intended, and on the bottom right, firebug will tell you the line number and filename of each rule in effect.

Dear Captain,
It sounds like you haven’t become acquainted with firebug. It’s an extension to firefox that shows you each ‘box’ in your css, with one color for padding and another for the margin. It will tell you the line number and file name for each css rule in effect for the part of the page you’re interested in. You will love it.

I got it! Inside main.com/secondary/wp-content/themes/mytheme/style.css, I removed all the code and inserted

@import url(main.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/style.css);

and then added some code for the specific secondary banner. This of course overrides the banner definition in the imported file because of the cascade.

I would like to credit themeshaper.com/wordpress-child-theme-basics/ which gave me the basic idea. (I’m sort of doing the opposite of a child theme.)

Thanks for responding! Debut video capture software doesn’t seem to record in those formats, so that wouldn’t be very convenient. At any rate as long as the clips work in at least one browser, I’ll be happy. I can tell the students to use a particular brand of browser if necessary.

I found Hana Flv Player and I like it. Debut supports recording in flv. For anyone who wants to display the test clip provided by the plugin, turn your sound off first!

One thing I like about Hana Flv Player is that I don’t have to use the WordPress admin panel upload video button, which is so tedious. All I have to do is upload the video files to the plugin folder. Now I am inspired to try to find a plugin for photos that bypasses the upload photo button.