Alternate Headers

Thanks, I think you’ve put me on a better path. I probably should learn PHP more before I try to do this stuff, but I guess I’m learning by doing.
Actually, while I was hoping for a response I found and tried to use a conditional with if (is_home()) like this:

<?php
if (is_home()) {
<div id=”bigfeat”>
<div class=”bigfeatleft”>
<div class=”featured3″>
<?php $recent = new WP_Query(“cat=26&showposts=1”); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
<h2>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php the_content(__(‘Read the story »’));?><div style=”clear:both;”></div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</div>
</div>
<div class=”bigfeatright”>
<div class=”video”>
<h2>Featured Video</h2>
<object width=”425″ height=”355″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/EfLXV5Iekxc&rel=1″></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/EfLXV5Iekxc&rel=1&#8243; type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”300″ height=”216″></embed></object>
</div>
<div class=”newsletter”>
<h2>eNews & Updates</h2>
<p>Sign up to receive the latest breaking news, as well as all of your other favorite headlines!</p><form id=”searchform2″ action=”http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverify&#8221; method=”post” target=”popupwindow” onsubmit=”window.open(‘http://www.feedburner.com&#8217;, ‘popupwindow’, ‘scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520’);return true”><p><input type=”text” value=”Enter your email address…” id=”s2″ onfocus=”if (this.value == ‘Enter your email address…’) {this.value = ”;}” onblur=”if (this.value == ”) {this.value = ‘Enter your email address…’;}” name=”email”/><input type=”hidden” value=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~e?ffid=1396718&#8243; name=”url”/><input type=”hidden” value=”eNews Subscribe” name=”title”/><input type=”submit” value=”GO” id=”sbutt2″ /></p></form>
</div>
</div>
</div> }
?>

But that gave me a syntax error:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘<‘ in /home/content/p/e/y/peyotebill/html/kenalu/wp-content/themes/revolution-magazine/header.php on line 318

So I looked at some other examples and realized that the HTML statements inside php code generally have echo statements. So I surrounded all the HTML with Echo’s, and got pretty much the same errors. I know you didn’t sign up to teach newbies PHP, but do you have any suggestions?

Really? I would thing the statement would have to be inside the PHP tag to execute.

I pretty much suspected that, I thought that was why you wrap them in echo statements like:

<?php
if (is_home()) {
echo ‘<div id=”bigfeat”>’;

I’ll try your suggestion though.

PHP 101…

This:

<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
<div id="bigfeat">
<?php } ?>

Is much the same as:

<?php
if (is_home()) {
echo '<div id="bigfeat">';
} ?>

For the PHP interpreter, anything that falls within the if statement (i.e. between ‘{‘ and ‘}’) is processed. But since it lies outside the <php ?> tags, the interpreter assumes it’s just output.

Paste up your header.php template here

http://wordpress.pastebin.com/

And link back with the url provided for it.

Oh, and is there a book you recommend. I’m reading a number of online PHP and CSS references, but most seem to talk only about syntax. I dug into the W3C tutorials a lot before I asked the question and looked at a lot of sample code in the WordPress documentation. Didn’t really get close.

The W3C examples seem particularly unhelpful and kind of ugly.

“why would one elect to use the echo ‘<div id=”bigfeat”>’; approach?“

In most cases it’s up to the inidividual coder, though of course how the code is implemented can sometimes dictate the need.

Around here we tend to minimalize the use of echo or printf or whatnot, to keep the code portions as readable as possible to anyone not so well versed in PHP or programming in general. We don’t support a blogging tool meant only for programmers. ;)