WP Front Page Moficiations - Irish SEO, Marketing & Webmaster Discussion

Cormac · #1 (**permalink**) 16-08-2007, 09:53 PM

Hi,
Does anyone know of a resource which will provide me with the necessary code to modify the presentation of my blog's homepage? I'm trying to give Wordpress more of a CMS feel to it and I want the homepage to be a type of splash page.

On the homepage I would have:
The most recent post in full
Post 2,3,4,5 display as excerpts with a 'read more' link
The 5 most recent comments displayed within the main content area (not within the sidebar)
And a few other items..

In pseudocode terms the design would be"

Code:

if user is on the homepage{
display x,y,z within main-content div and drop the sidebar }
if user is on a single post {
display the post's content and place a sidebar to the right

paul · #2 (**permalink**) 17-08-2007, 09:38 AM

Cormac there is an option to have a certain page (rather than post) be displayed on the index.php go to here Cormac Moylan › Login

Then you could get the execphp.php plugin to grab the last five posts via the wordpress Codex.

I've been doing a fair bit of playing with Wordpress and it's amazing what it can do.

Cormac · #3 (**permalink**) 17-08-2007, 01:56 PM

Hi Paul,
I knew that you could set a static homepage using a page but I wasn't aware of the execphp.php plugin. That's the type of thing I'm looking for.

Hemingway - Hemingway - Warpspire - has a modified homepage which is kind of similar to what I want to achieve.

alexleonard · #4 (**permalink**) 17-08-2007, 08:38 PM

I would suggest that you don't necessarily need the execphp plugin. It's handy, but I've found it to be buggy at times, and it can also clash with some of the XHTML correction from the TinyMCE plugin.

I would suggest that it might be worth making these kind of alterations within your theme. It gives you more control and you won't bash your head off the keyboard when things aren't working right.

On our website I have set the home page as a static page, therefore using the "page.php" file as per the template hierarchy used in Word Press.

I wanted to display our most recent portfolio item, and the method done to achieve this is the same as what you are looking for. Here's the code that I've dropped into my page.php template file and I'll break it down below.

Code:

<?php if (is_page('4')) { ?>
<h1 class="hright">Recent Work</h1>
<?php query_posts('cat=8&show_posts=1&posts_per_page=1'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="post-wrap home-portfolio" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
    <h3 class="post-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h3>
        <div class="story-content">
        <?php the_content('Continue Reading &raquo;'); ?>
        <?php link_pages('<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', '</p>', 'number'); ?>
        </div><!-- end post content -->
</div><!-- end post -->
<?php endwhile; endif;  
} // end if is_page 4! ?>

So, as my page ID is "4", I have said if the page is page 4 show 1 post from category 8 (which is our portfolio category) after the beginning of "The Loop" we get the display of the_title and the_content.

In your case, you'll need to start the same if (is_page('x')), which you'll need to follow with 2 or 3 uses of the loop.

The first loop use will probably look like:

Code:

<?php query_posts('show_posts=1&posts_per_page=1'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php the_content('Continue Reading &raquo;'); ?>

With the second loop looking like:

Code:

<?php query_posts('show_posts=5&posts_per_page=1'); ?>
 <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php the_excerpt('Continue Reading &raquo;'); ?>

Now, I'm being a little rough here, but hopefully you catch my drift. Obviously the excerpt usage would need to exclude the most recent post as that is being reproduced in full. There are ways of doing this explained fully in the codex.

Comments can be a good laugh. I've found that the inbuilt word press comment fetching is a little basic for my HTML structural desires. I've been using the Get Recent Comments plugin to help with this.

Dropping the sidebar can be done easily as well using if statements.

To give a full picture, here's a condensed version of my page.php file:

Code:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
  <div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
   <?php the_content(); ?>
  </div><!-- end post -->
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
 <h2 class="title"><?php _e('Not Found'); ?></h2>
 <p><?php _e("Sorry, but the page you're looking for couldn't be found. Double check your URL or you should try searching for it."); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

<?php if (is_page('4')) { ?>
<h1 class="hright">Recent Work</h1>
<?php query_posts('cat=8&show_posts=1&posts_per_page=1'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
   <h3 class="post-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h3>
    <?php the_content('Continue Reading &raquo;'); ?>
</div><!-- end post -->
<?php endwhile; endif;  
} // end if is_page 4! ?>

<!-- Begin Sidebar -->
<?php 
include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar-page.php'); 
?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Cormac · #5 (**permalink**) 17-08-2007, 09:18 PM

Cheers Alex,
That's a fairly detailed explanation.
I'll take some thought from the code you supplied and I'll check out the Codex further too.

alexleonard · #6 (**permalink**) 17-08-2007, 09:22 PM

Aye. There's quite a bit of customisation you can do...

The codex is nearly brilliant.. I've spent so much time on there over the last while and it's nearly always sorted me out (with a little help from the forums).

Definitely loving the word press thing though. It's fantastic.

paul · #7 (**permalink**) 18-08-2007, 04:20 PM

That's a great post Alex, nice tips !

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