Themes don't come with extra page templates ?

  • alptkz

    (@alptkz)


    12 years, 4 months ago

    Hi everyone

    I’m new at WP, but there’s something I don’t quite understand. Installing a theme is great to get quickly started with a blog, but as soon as you try to add extra non-blog pages, the themes out there start lacking.

    It seems to me that anyone who wants extra pages on a WP website would not want them formatted like blog pages right ? By that, I mean a layout that doesn’t show comments, nor the latest blog articles at the bottom. In other words, the page layout would only show what you enter as text (and images, etc.) when creating the page from the WP client site.

    But it seems that’s not possible without doing some serious coding and reading a lot of tutorials. You thus have to create a page template from scratch, and match all the classes used from the theme you picked (difficult for a beginner).

    So am I missing something ? It just seems like something that would be included in most themes out there: a blank one column layout for you to add text to. Is it actually there and I don’t see it ?

    I get the feeling the replies will make me feel like an idiot, but I’ve been looking for hours and couldn’t find any clear answer on this. Thanks a lot if you can enlighten me.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • sacredpath

    (@sacredpath)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    12 years, 4 months ago

    Some themes have no-sidebar page templates, and other template as well, and some do not. It’s all up to the theme designer. Page templates, as long as you are not wanting to do some tricky things, are not that difficult, and I will in most cases use an existing page template as a starting point.

    Also as far as hiding sidebars and things like that on static pages, that can be done painlessly with CSS in many cases (depending on how rich the selectors are in the theme you are using).

    If you search on Google for “wordpress page template how to” you will find a number of articles and a couple videos (watch the one from 2010 as the one from 2007 may not work with the later versions of wordpress.

    There is also the codex on pages and page templates at http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Creating_Your_Own_Page_Templates .

    Thread Starter alptkz

    (@alptkz)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    Thanks for your reply sacredpath. Can you tell me which file you usually use as a base that you modify into a template ? In my case (blogolife theme), I used the content-page.php file but it gave me a few issues.

    Overall, I realize it’s definitely possible to do just that, but it requires some basic knowledge of html and css (which I fortunately have). I always thought that WP was very accessible but this shows that a regular person without technical skills cannot create simple pages with just text.

    In any case, this was my surprise and I wanted to make sure I’m not missing something obvious. Thanks for clarifying.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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