Chip Bennett

Your best bet is probably to use custom post meta data, with custom meta boxes.

I did what you said. It’s still called. I still have no idea what it is or how I would go about getting rid of it, if I should.

Well, that tells you that the external resource is not called by the Theme.

What Plugins do you have active?

(Note: I suspect that this resource is not malicious; it sounds looks to me like a CDN reference.)

If you want a “welcome or introduction as a static message”, just create a static front page. Voila! No date displayed on your welcome message. 🙂

What Theme are you using?

Every Theme in the official Theme repository – at least every one updated in the past year and a half or so – is perfectly suitable for a site that does not incorporate a blog.

All you need to do is create a static front page, and not specify a Page for Posts. Voila! Your site no longer presents a blog posts index.

Will you still see the blog functionality in the WP-Admin area? Yes, of course. But that’s not a Theme issue; Themes are entirely Presentational – they merely specify what your site visitors see. If you want to remove any mention of blog posts from the WP-Admin area, you’ll probably need to look for a Plugin to do that.

How do you intend to determine which posts are “featured”? Sticky posts? Taxonomy? Custom post meta? Something else?

Any particular reason you opted to check if it’s the page for posts rather than the homepage?

Yes: because I didn’t want to assume that you wanted to modify handling of sticky posts if you later decided to display the blog posts index on the site front page.

As an alternative, you could test for the showcase template itself:

function mychildtheme_filter_pre_get_posts( $query ) {
    if ( ! is_page_template( 'showcase.php' ) ) {
        $query->set( 'ignore_sticky_posts', true );
    }
    return $query;
}
add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'mychildtheme_filter_pre_get_posts' );

That way, you would only ever see/use sticky posts on a page using the Showcase template, regardless of what other template file is loaded.