jonwolfe

I figured out a solution, and I’m posting it here in case someone else needs to do something similar with their blog.

I figured out I could access part of the PHP global variable $_SERVER, specifically $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’], and compare that to my blog’s homepage url. If they are the same, I include my custom header template with the special content I want to appear _only_ on the homepage, else I include the standard header template for my blog theme.

Why is this better than querying the wordpress function is_home()? Because is_home() returns true even when you page through your older entries. My technique allows you to include custom content on your blog’s frontpage and _only_ on the frontpage.

Here’s the code:

<?php

	$request_loc = 'http://www.yourdomainname.com';
	$request_loc .= $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
	$blog_loc = get_bloginfo('url');
	$blog_loc .= '/'; //wordpress seems to not allow trailing slashes on the blog url variable

	if ( $request_loc == $blog_loc )
	{
		include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/your_custom_template.php');
	}
	else
	{
		get_header(); //include the standard header
	}
?>

Hi, thanks for the reply. To answer your question, no, I’m not doing anything special in the organization of my pages.

The thing is, is_home() returns true whether you go to ‘/’, ‘/index.php’, ‘/page/1’, or ‘/page/2/’. I wish it only returned true for ‘/’ or ‘/index.php’.

You can test this for yourself by putting the following code into your header template:

	<?php
		if (is_home())
		{
			echo 'is_home() returned true';
		}
		else
		{
			echo 'is_home() returned false';
		}
	?>