<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Jennifer Hodgdon <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:yahgrp@poplarware.com">yahgrp@poplarware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
There's a bold-face paragraph at the top saying that page is not applicable as of WordPress 2.1, and it points to<br>
<a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_SubPanel" target="_blank">http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_SubPanel</a><br>
which documents how to set your front page. What more do you think needs to be done?</blockquote><div><br clear="all">I have to admit, this is one area of Wordpress which has always confused me. Although that's more down to behaviour than the Codex documentation. I'll try to explain.<br>
<br>With the default settings, the homepage displays the most recent n posts, and uses the home.php template if available, or if not, the index.php template. So far, so good.<br><br>Often, however, you'll want homepage to just be a static content page, and have the blog as a separate section of the website. For this, you set the front page to be one of your 'pages'. However, this causes the front page to use the page.php template instead of the home.php template. This is fine if you want the page to look the same as all the other static pages, but if you want a different template for the homepage, you have to create a new template, give it a name via a PHP comment, and then associate it with the homepage via the 'Template' dropdown in the right hand nav. It would seem to be much more logical to use automatically the home.php template (if it exists) instead, but this doesn't happen.<br>
<br>The final circumstance is where you want to display the most recent n posts on the front page, but you also want to have a few paragraphs of intro text at the top. For this, the ideal would be to use a Wordpress page to hold the intro text, and then display the n posts beneath (with the number based on the setting in options-reading.php). However, because The Loop only displays the page content OR the posts, the only way to achieve this (that I can find) is to create a new named template, associate that with the page that's being used as the front page, and then manually define a get_posts() function call within the template to retrieve the most recent posts.<br>
<br>Does that sound like an accurate assessment of how the various settings work, or have I missed something? <br></div></div><br>If I've got it right, this is definitely something that could be better explained on the Codex, as it took me ages to get my head around this...<br>
<br>Frankie<br><br>-- <br>Frankie Roberto<br><br><br>