Sweet Boutique Design - Web and Graphic Design Studio » Tutorials

How to Make a Custom WordPress Page Template

Stephanie — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:04:23 +0000

In WordPress, there’s an option before you publish a page, to select a template. This option will only show if your theme has page templates. Custom page templates are great if you need a page to look different than other pages on your blog. The whole purpose of having a custom template is to possibly show a different sidebar, a full page width (no sidebar) or totally different HTML in this area. You might need to change your style sheet by adding special classes for your content or sidebars if you do this.

This is how to make a custom page template for your WordPress theme. Instead of showing bits an pieces of code that you can’t visualize together, I’m just going to show what the whole code should look like. Obviously, your code will call your style sheet classes and they will probably be called something other than “main” and “content”. Create a new PHP page and add the code below to the top of the page. You can do this in a text editor or an html editor. Right after where its says “Template Name:”, type in the name you want your template to be called. That’s the template name that will show up in the drop down box in the page you’re creating.

You can also take your index.php file and copy and paste that into a new file below the reference that goes at the top to get you started. But, doing that really wouldn’t look different than your main site. Once you have your code created (based on what I’ve shown you below) for your page template, save your page as template_name.php (don’t really use the file name I just used, come up with your own name and don’t name it page.php or you will overwrite your page file). Upload that to your theme file and when you edit or add a new page to your WP blog, your template name should now show up in the drop down menu to select from.

Sample Code for Custom Page Template

This code below gives you a general idea of what your page template should look like

Images from the web

Stephanie — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:16:36 +0000

This is a crash course in using images from the web on a a blog and website. If you do want to use an image you find in a Google, Yahoo or some other image search, please follow these simple steps.

DON’T just use an image from a GOOGLE or YAHOO image search!
Find a legal place to purchase a graphic you want to use on your website or blog (iStock, Dreamstime, BigStock Photo, etc.)
Make sure this image doesn’t belong to someone else (9 times out of 10 it will).
Use an image legally, take the time to find out who the author of the image is.
Just because an image is on the Internet, and you can right click to save to your desktop, doesn’t mean it’s free to take an use, especially for commercial use.
If you don’t want to do any of that, make your own graphics or images.
If you don’t want to make your own images and still take whatever you want, legal action could be taken against you by the artist or image owner.

Just remember, the Internet is not a place to just take whatever you want and use it. The sad truth is that it happens way to much and many artists and designers are left with the bad taste in their mouth from copyright infringement.

Making .htm extensions work

Stephanie — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:53:17 +0000

If you can’t get .htm extensions to work if you’re using HostGator, try adding the line below to your .htaccess page. This works, especially if you’re using Option Cart on your site.

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php .htm .html