moymadethis

I added what I needed to the web.config and nothin broke so I guess I’m good!

To eliminate children I changed the depth from 0 to 1, that also worked a treat. I copied all the code from my parent theme functions.php and edited that line. Does the method you’re suggesting allow me to only amend the one line of code instead of copying it all?

I’ve decided I’m going to look into PHP contact forms. I tried a few plugins but they’re difficult to style. I assume I don’t need to look at WordPress specific forms if I’m building it from scratch. As long as it’s a PHP/AJAX contact from I should be good. Just looking to follow a YouTube tutorial, so any suggestions are welcome! 🙂

That’s ok. I don’t fully understand but by using the array I set the resolution I need so I won’t worry about it too much. It’s my first WordPress site so I need to get into my head it’s not going to be perfect and with every website I build I’ll understand and find out more. There’s not a single dev who doesn’t look back and their older work and thinks “Why did I do that” / “I can’t believe I did that” and that’s the way it should be as you should always be improving.

I need to add some contact forms but I think I’ll leave creating one from scratch until my next website, when I can spend a bit more time on it. So I’ll look at plugins for now.

My website is nearly there and a very large amount of the build it down to your help so thanks a lot! I know I’ve said this before but I have a couple of smaller questions but when I think I can leave this thread alone haha!

Archives (widgets)
I’ve noticed these display on every page. Is there a way to only show them on post pages?

Main menu dropdown
When child pages are added to a parent page in the main nav, a dropdown (nested list) is created called ‘children’ and the list-item with a dropdown has an additional class of ‘page_item_has_children’. I can’t find anything to do with this in my parent theme functions.php, so I guess it’s the default WordPress behaviour?

The question is, can you turn off the dropdown via the CMS? Or do you need to write some code in functions.php to turn it off? I’ve created a sub-menu in the sidebar instead so I don’t need it. I created a custom menu in Appearance > Menus and turned off child pages – is that the best way to do it?

Back (up a level) link
On child pages I want to add a link to return to the parent page. I thought I could achieve this with the following code but it’s not quite there:

<a href="'.get_permalink($post->post_parent).'">'.get_the_title($post->post_parent).'</a>

Can you see what I’m missing? Also I’d need to add a condition so the link isn’t shown if the current page is the parent – otherwise it’ll show on every page wether it’s a child page or a parent, with or without children?

Managed to get the thumbnail placeholder working. People suggested if/else statements but not of them would work. I copied an if/else from a post page of the theme and based it off that and it worked with this:

<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="h-entry__image-link">
	<?php if ( has_post_thumbnail()) : // Check if thumbnail exists ?>
		<?php the_post_thumbnail(array(120,120),array('class' => 'u-featured')); // Declare pixel size you need inside the array ?>
	<?php else: ?>
		<img src="<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri(); ?>/img/interface/placeholder-image.png" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>"/>
	<?php endif; ?>
</a>

Wordpress didn’t seem to like the else statements we declared, even though they were there we got browser errors like “”PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘else’ (T_ELSE)”. Seems to work now though, maybe an issue with using brackets instead of colons.

Now I just need the image sizes and side menu sorted 🙂

Great, yeah I tried just copying and pasting the sidebar related code into my functions.php and editing what I needed – adding an additional class to “before_widget” but the class wasn’t added. So I guess I need to give it a new name and adjust the template accordingly.

Speaking of copy/pasting from the functions.php, my parent them has this handy bit of code for new menus:

function register_html5_menu()
{
    register_nav_menus(array( // Using array to specify more menus if needed
        'header-menu' => __('Header Menu', 'html5blank'), // Main Navigation
        'sidebar-menu' => __('Sidebar Menu', 'html5blank'), // Sidebar Navigation
        'extra-menu' => __('Extra Menu', 'html5blank') // Extra Navigation if needed (duplicate as many as you need!)
    ));
}

Editing the names in the parent them works and they’re updated in the CMS …but obviously I don’t want to be doing that 😉

I copied this code into my child theme and tried to amend it but I got a PHP Fatal error: Cannot redeclare register_html5_menu().

So I guess I need to give this a new name to be able to edit/add menus. The only thing is I couldn’t find where to change the call – any ideas? As this is CMS based maybe it’s something I shouldn’t be touching?

Great, I managed to add wp_reset_postdata(); like in the (2nd) example I gave above.

However, I found it a bit difficult on pages where the code appears like this:

<?php if (have_posts()): while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php get_template_part('loop'); ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else: ?>
	<!-- article -->
	<article>
		<h2><?php _e( 'Sorry, nothing to display.', 'html5blank' ); ?></h2>
	</article>
	<!-- /article -->
<?php endif; ?>

<?php get_template_part('pagination'); ?>

Does that mean I need to include the code like <?php wp_reset_postdata(); ?> but just after <?php get_template_part('loop'); ?>? Or is there a better place to put it?

I noticed my parent theme had the following code in it’s functions.php:

if (function_exists('register_sidebar'))
{
    // Define Sidebar Widget Area 1
    register_sidebar(array(
        'name' => __('Widget Area 1', 'html5blank'),
        'description' => __('Description for this widget-area...', 'html5blank'),
        'id' => 'widget-area-1',
        'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="%2$s">',
        'after_widget' => '</div>',
        'before_title' => '<h3>',
        'after_title' => '</h3>'
    ));

    // Define Sidebar Widget Area 2
    register_sidebar(array(
        'name' => __('Widget Area 2', 'html5blank'),
        'description' => __('Description for this widget-area...', 'html5blank'),
        'id' => 'widget-area-2',
        'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="%2$s">',
        'after_widget' => '</div>',
        'before_title' => '<h3>',
        'after_title' => '</h3>'
    ));
}

I thought about amending the before_widget bit to read:

'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="%2$s side-nav">',

Which seemed to add the class ok, I just wanted to check that will just target the navigation/category lists before proceeding?

Thanks again! 🙂

Ok, this is the solution I’ve ended up using. It seems to work but I’d appreciate any pointing out flaws if they see any…

I amended my loop.php so the wrapping if/else statement was removed. This left loop.php looking like this:

<article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>

    <!-- post thumbnail -->
    <?php if ( has_post_thumbnail()) : // Check if thumbnail exists ?>
        <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="h-entry__image-link">
            <?php the_post_thumbnail(array(120,120)); // Declare pixel size you need inside the array ?>
        </a>
    <?php endif; ?>
    <!-- /post thumbnail -->

    <!-- post title -->
    <h2 class="p-name">
        <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
    </h2>
    <!-- /post title -->

    <!-- post details -->
    <time datetime="<?php the_time('Y-m-j'); ?>" class="dt-published"><?php the_time('jS F Y'); ?></time>
    <!-- /post details -->

    <?php html5wp_summary('html5wp_index'); // Build your custom callback length in functions.php ?>

    <p><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="arrow-link">Read the full article</a></p>

    <?php edit_post_link(); ?>

</article>

The part this was removed was this:

<?php if (have_posts()): while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

   [ARTICLE CODE WAS IN HERE]

<?php endwhile; ?>

<?php else: ?>

    <!-- article -->
    <article>
        <h2><?php _e( 'Sorry, nothing to display.', 'html5blank' ); ?></h2>
    </article>
    <!-- /article -->

<?php endif; ?>

This allowed me to use the following code on the homepage to pull in the latest 3 posts:

<div class="h-feed featured-blog">
	<?php
	    $args = array(
		    'posts_per_page'    => 3,
		    'post_type'     => 'post',  //choose post type here
		    'order' => 'DESC',
		);
		// query
		$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );
		
		
		if( $the_query->have_posts() ):
		    while( $the_query->have_posts() ) : $the_query->the_post();
		        get_template_part('loop');
		    endwhile; 
		else :
		
		endif;
	?>
</div>

This gets the posts working on the homepage (front-page.php) great. I had to wrap the code in the parent div markup. This mightn’t be ideal on other sites but it actually works quite well for me here as I need to be able to add different classes on the blog/home page.

The big issue with this was that only 1 post was displayed on the blog page as the code loading it looked like this:

<?php get_template_part('loop'); ?>

I amended this by wrapping the if/else statement around the get_template_part so it now looks like this:

<?php if (have_posts()): while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php get_template_part('loop'); ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>

<?php else: ?>

	<!-- article -->
	<article>
		<h2><?php _e( 'Sorry, nothing to display.', 'html5blank' ); ?></h2>
	</article>
	
	<!-- /article -->
	
<?php endif; ?>

<?php get_template_part('pagination'); ?>

That all seems to work. I was even able to use the same code for my Custom Post Type changing 'post_type' => 'post' to 'post_type' => 'custom-post-name' to pull those posts onto the homepage.

I’ve not checked if the pagination still works and what happens when 10+ posts are on the page but can anyone see any problems with what I’ve done?

Thanks again for all your help and time giving me information on this. I still don’t fully understand but at least we’re getting there haha!

Noooo! This is why I’ve always had back-end dev’s around to do this haha!

Can I use wp_reset_query(); to reset the WordPress query after looping through the custom query so it reverts back to the default query for the current page? I friend told me to use that but I couldn’t get it to work. Is that due to how my loop.php is set up?

There has to be an easier/better way than just duplicating the code from loop.php onto the homepage, right? Though I am tempted to do that just to get it done haha!

Is that covered in the code provided by @poonam9?

I think this might be a little too advanced for me, so maybe I’m getting ahead of myself a little!

I get what you’re saying about the custom post types. If I create a Custom Post and ‘view’ it. I can see part of the URL is /html5-blank/. So I created a page called “Case Studies” and edited the URL to match that and it seems to work. Is that the way you meant me to do it?

Do Custom Post Types use the same loop as the default post type? If so, I guess I’ll need to duplicate that php file and set the Custom Post Type to use that instead?