understanding template hierarchy

  • Resolved hyacinthus

    (@hyacinthus)


    9 years, 3 months ago

    I want to be sure I understand what happens when someone clicks on a link on my site. I am currently building my own theme and have a front page display of thumbnails of posts in several categories. What I want to happen is when someone clicks on one of those, they end up going to a page that shows more thumbnails of posts in a specific category. I know how to display those, I’m just unsure how I get to that file.
    From the Theme Handbook I read,

    If your blog is at http://example.com/blog/ and a visitor clicks on a link to a category page such as http://example.com/blog/category/your-cat/, WordPress looks for a template file in the current theme’s directory that matches the category’s ID to generate the correct page.

    So if I have a template file called category-whatever.php, and if someone clicks on the thumbnail representing “whatever” on my home page, WordPress looks for that category-whatever.php file? If I’ve got that correct, that’s great. It’s just completely different from what I’m used to when writing code for other things. Where is the little elf in WordPress that makes the decision? I can see a couple of files in the call stack in netbeans when I’m debugging.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • esmi

    (@esmi)

    9 years, 3 months ago

    So if I have a template file called category-whatever.php, and if someone clicks on the thumbnail representing “whatever” on my home page, WordPress looks for that category-whatever.php file

    Yes. If category-whatever.php doesn’t exist, WP falls back to using category.php and, as a last resort, index.php.

    Thread Starter hyacinthus

    (@hyacinthus)

    9 years, 3 months ago

    Well, I tried it but it didn’t work. I have a category called ‘tables’ and I have a file called category-tables.php, but when I clicked on the post falling under the category ‘tables’ I still ended up in index.php. What could I be doing wrong?

    So when I set a breakpoint in Template-Loader and it goes through all those elseif’s to find the template, it ends up with

    else :
		$template = get_index_template();
	endif;

    The only flag I can see being set is $single which is set to 1 at that time. But I don’t have a single-tables.php file.

    • This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by hyacinthus. Reason: a bit more information
    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    9 years, 3 months ago

    One minor clarification on esmi’s post. In between category.php and index.php in the template chain is archive.php.

    The category template chain is used when multiple posts in a certain category are returned by the query. When only one post is returned, the single template chain is used. The only template in common between the two is the last resort index.php. If you need special category handling on single type templates, it needs to handled through template code. The WP template loader is not going to be helpful in this situation.

    Thread Starter hyacinthus

    (@hyacinthus)

    9 years, 3 months ago

    I think I’m getting closer to having it work. I think I had the wrong href in my link on the front page.
    But if I need special category handling on single type templates, would I then create a single-tables.php file? And then maybe do my own loop there? Sometimes I get confused by what has to be done within the loop and what can be done outside. Any tutorials lurking around for that?

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    9 years, 3 months ago

    Sorry, I’m unaware of any related tutorials. They may exist, I just don’t know about them.

    Any category as part of a single-*.php template name will not work. Only post types and IDs work with single names. What I meant is on the normal single post template, you could add an if/else conditional structure where if the current post’s categories includes “whatever”, then handle output a particular way, else do the normal single output. In essence, two templates in one.

    Determining if a category is applied takes a bit of coding by itself. You can get all the categories with wp_get_post_categories(), but the category you are looking for can be anywhere in the returned list. Thus you need to loop through all the listed terms to see if any of them are “whatever”.

    Thread Starter hyacinthus

    (@hyacinthus)

    9 years, 3 months ago

    Thanks for the extra clarification. I can see that it’s going to take some time to get up to speed on how WordPress works. But I’m getting there.

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    9 years, 3 months ago

    No problem!

    I don’t wish to be discouraging, but after 5 years working with WP, I still don’t fully understand how it works! It’s OK though. As you gain experience, you learn what you need to learn 🙂

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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