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1. svedish
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Hi,

   and sorry if my question is really stupid. I'm just trying to understand WP a bit more in depth and the process is not always the smoothest.

   I was creating a test page using the standard page.php template and I wanted to display:

   • The regular page contents
   • Underneath that, the posts as I would see them on the blog home page

   It was just a test, so bare with me if such a page wouldn't be of much use on a real website.

   I thought I could copy and paste the Loop from the index.php into the page.php template and I would have solved my issue. Unfortunately this didn't seem to output any posts at all. Using WP_Query, query_posts or get_posts would have done the trick instead.

   So my question is: why that Loop outputs all the posts on the home page (or index.php) and doesn't output any post at all if used in the page template?

   Big thanks in advance :)

2. Mark / t31os
   Moderator
   Posted 2 years ago #

   page.php is a reserved file for theme's to display "pages", "page templates" are files you can attach to WordPress "pages" so you can use that page url as a placeholder for whatever content your "page template" dictates it should output, be that post or page content... or whatever you want..

   page.php should not be used as a "page template", WordPress won't quite know if it's a page template, or a theme archive file...

   Sorry if i can't explain myself very well, but i can understand the confusion of pages/page templates/template files .... the naming system isn't very clear, and can be somewhat confusing/misleading at times..

3. svedish
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Hi t31os_,

   I have to admit I don't understand the answer :) So sorry! But maybe my question was not very clear either, so my apologies if this is the case.

   Ok, let's say I create a template called various_contents.php and I assign it for the page with the title "Various Contents" in the CMS. In the template file, after the page contents I paste ALSO the index.php Loop to get a list of posts as well. It just doesn't work. That Loop works perfectly in index.php, but won't work in my newly created page template. Why?

   Thanks

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