rwatkins

Hey there.

All the PHP commands are the ones that display the text that has been written it at the WordPress control panel. They are the “template tags” and they pull out the information from the database and put it on the page. A list of these tags are available on the Codex – https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Template_Tags .

To insert tables all you do is edit the HTML in what you pasted (the tags you recognise) and change it into the table layout that you require. Hopefully you can pick up what each of the PHP commands do as you go along (normally through trial and error!) and you will have your very own template at the end. Then you will have the tabular layout defined in your templates and all your users need to do is go to the WordPress administration area and fill in the form to make a post. WordPress will use your template to turn their post into a webpage that has the layout you wrote.

(A nicer way of doing the above would be to start from scratch – creating a template using just plain old HTML and text to represent your finished site. Then all you have to do is change the non-layout bits (so all the weblog posts, etc) into the template tags and then add that template to WordPress.)

Note that the design of the WordPress template system is such that each template file only makes up a small part of what is displayed on screen. The PHP commands that call get_header() get_footer() get_sidebar() all call *other* templates (that are in seperate files) that display bits on the screen. You can probably tell what they do from their names.

So for the template you have pasted above, it first of all tells WordPress to print the header (from a seperate template), then does its own work (displaying all the messages posted to the weblog) and finally tells WordPress to print the sidebar (that’s the navigation thingy that is usually on the left/right of every weblog) and then to print the footer of the page.*

And all you need to do is replace the HTML in the templates with the HTML that you want to display :).

* – moshu has written a really cool “Visual Anatomy of a WordPress Theme” and it pretty much outlines what I’ve said above in a nicer way.

If you have any more questions, fire away. I’ve probably made things 100 times more confusing…if so, ignore what I just said!

Thanks.

Rob

Hi there.

Looks like you’ve got a problem in the permalink structure somewhere. Going via the ‘post id’ link https://summers.wordsweave.com/index.php?p=3 (which I guessed) you can access the correct page which lets you post comments.

Try recreating your permalink structure from the control panel (go to options>permalink>update permalink structure). See if that gives you any errors. The rest of the permalink structure seems to work though, which is a little strange. Maybe it just needs a little kick or something!

Give it a go and see what happens anyway.

Rob

Yeah, as far as I know Internet Explorer doesn’t understand the CSS element that changes the list thingy i.e the >> (if you look in the css the element is called li:before).

There are ways to make internet explorer display at least some sort of bullet (the little black circle) by adding some stuff to the CSS file. If you want to know how to do that then tell me and I’ll paste some code.

Rob