Yes or No – Does Editing Content Require Code?

  • acebaker

    (@acebaker)


    11 years, 6 months ago

    So I’ve just paid a large sum of money to a developer and received my WordPress website. I was told that editing content would be easy. Indeed, when I first installed WP, I was able to install and activate various themes, and edit content in the editor.

    However, now I am completely unable to edit any content on my site, and my developer now says that any and all content changes must be done through them, for $75 / hour.

    There are many “pages” that display on the site, and these “pages” are listed in the dashboard section “all pages”. For example:

    http://musicmarket.me/products/

    However, the content on the “pages” do not show up in the editor. They say “Word Count:0” even though there are many words on the page.

    According to a third party, editing the content on my website requires editing “templates”, which in turn positively requires the use of XHTML code, and CSS code, and PHP code.

    I’d like to determine whether or not it is true that editing content in my WordPress site requires code.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • lisa

    (@contentiskey)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    normally, PAGES and POSTS do not require special coding to change text, links, or images.
    if you need to get some training on how to manage your website content (PAGES and POSTS) I can make a few recommendations.
    sometimes, page content is managed by widgets.

    Shawn Hooper

    (@shooper)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    Hi acebaker,

    The page you provided as an example looks like an index page with information about each of your products. I suspect that the description of each product, it’s image, etc. should be editable in WordPress in the post/page for the individual product.

    The template this page uses, that specifies how each product in the list is displayed, would require code changes to modify.

    -Shawn

    Thread Starter acebaker

    (@acebaker)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    @ Shawn,

    Conceptually that makes sense to me. However, I’ve carefully opened every single page, and every single post, and none of them displays the content that I see on the “products” page.

    @ contentiskey,

    If text, links and images do not normally require coding, and assuming that I am correct that text, links and images currently do not appear in my editor, then my site is abnormal, is this correct?

    How I would I determine if a widget was being used to manage content?

    Yes, I’d be very interested in discovering credible advice regarding this vast strange and mysterious frontier WordPress.

    Shawn Hooper

    (@shooper)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    @acebaker,

    If you look in your theme folder, there should be a file called “page-Portfolio1ColSortable.php”.

    This file contains the template for the Products page.

    If you look in that file, are you seeing the product descriptions hardcoded in the template? (I’m hoping not…)

    Thread Starter acebaker

    (@acebaker)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    Checking file, product descriptions are not hardcoded into page-Portfolio1ColSortable.php.

    However, perhaps the products page is calling a different template? How do I trace content requests backwards through the code?

    Shawn Hooper

    (@shooper)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    The products page is definitely using the page-Portfolio1ColSortable.php page, I can see that by the class name in the <body> tag.

    If the product descriptions aren’t hardcoded, I suspect that that page is loading the product descriptions directly from the posts. Without seeing the code in that file though it’s hard to tell exactly what it’s grabbing. Are you able to post the code?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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