Mark

1. Set up a child theme.
2. Place a file named page-template-front.php in your child theme folder.
3. Put the following code in that file:

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Front Page
 *
 * Magazine layout with several loop areas and a featured content area (slider). This template must be manually set for a page. Then the same page can be set as a Front page from Settings -> Reading -> Front page displays -> A static page.
 *
 * @package Oxygen
 * @subpackage Template
 */

get_header(); // Loads the header.php template. ?>

	<?php get_template_part( 'featured-content' ); // Loads the featured-content.php template. ?>

	<div class="aside">

		<?php get_template_part( 'menu', 'secondary' ); // Loads the menu-secondary.php template.  ?>

		<?php get_sidebar( 'primary' ); // Loads the sidebar-primary.php template. ?>

	</div>

	<?php do_atomic( 'before_content' ); // oxygen_before_content ?>

	<div class="content-wrap">

		<div id="content">		

			<?php do_atomic( 'open_content' ); // oxygen_open_content ?>

			<div class="hfeed">

				<h4 class="section-title">Links</h4>

				<?php get_links(); ?>

			</div><!-- .hfeed -->

			<?php do_atomic( 'close_content' ); // oxygen_close_content ?>

		</div><!-- #content -->

		<?php do_atomic( 'after_content' ); // oxygen_after_content ?>

<?php get_footer(); // Loads the footer.php template. ?>

4. That gives you the default “Links” output. You can modify how links are placed there using the instructions found here.

By the way, Co-Authors Plus is fantastic. I’ve switched from Custom Author Byline and I’m not going back. The guest author bylines feature is very useful and using the above tweak I can get it to work with Hybrid-based themes.

The problem still remains that one has to edit Hybrid core files to make it work, due (apparently) to the Co-Authors Plus filters not being applied to all author-related function calls. (See my question above about “appropriate template tags”.)

This is my question too. How is this topic ‘resolved’? I haven’t been able to find an answer.

You seem to want to replace the primary menu (which isn’t so much “located on the server” as edited and set via the “Menus” settings page) by a automatically generated list of categories.

Probably the easiest way is to use a function like wp_list_categories() to generate a list of categories, which you can then style like the secondary menu by copying the css for the menu from the Oxygen theme and adjusting it to your needs.

You would place this function in a child theme in a copy of the the menu-primary.php template file.

Pretty much anything is possible. But for us to be of any help you need to provide more details on what you want precisely and on the modifications that you did try to make.

Do you want to change the width on all pages? Homepage only? Single posts? With or without sidebar? You need to be this specific because style.css sets the width for all these elements and you can change all of these individually.

I’m not sure chrisneylan’s reply really answers the question. Here is the most forward-compatible way to do this:

1. Make an Oxygen child theme by creating a new theme folder (your-theme) and creating a style.css file in that folder with the following content:

/*
Theme Name: Oxygen child theme
Author: Your Name
Template: oxygen
*/

@import url("../oxygen/style.css");

2. Copy the file page-template-front.php from the Oxygen theme folder into your new child theme.

3. Modify the page-template-front.php file in your child theme to delete the two custom loops that are responsible for pulling out “Recent articles” and “More articles”.

The brute way to do this is to remove all of the code that appears between the following two lines:

<?php do_atomic( 'open_content' ); // oxygen_open_content ?>
[remove everything in between here, lines 24-131]
<?php do_atomic( 'close_content' ); // oxygen_close_content ?>

CSS-only alternative

Alternatively, if you don’t care that posts are loaded and HTML is produced, you can simply hide it using CSS. Follow step 1 above and then add the following line to the child theme’s style.css:

.page-template-front #content { display:none }

I don’t recommend this approach as it just hides the posts instead of not loading them in the first place, but it does work.

Thanks, I will investigate that option. (The main reason we went for the simpler Custom Author Byline plugin is that that quite a few authors on our website are one-offs and we don’t necessarily want to go through the trouble of creating co-authors for them.)

The problem then remains though: how would you use the fix you describe above in a child theme, without modifying any parent theme files? I’ve tried redeclaring the relevant functions and shortcodes in my child theme’s functions.php, but I suspect I’m running into issues with the priorities and phases of adding actions and removing shortcodes. Getting out of my depth there.

The best solution for broad compatibility would be if the Hybrid [entry-author] shortcode could be made to refer to a redefined or enhanced entry-author-shortcode function, but I’m still not sure how to accomplish that in a child theme.