WordPress custom “static” homepage/menu issues

[janusoo]

Howdy folks. I’m sure the answer is buried in one of these posts somewhere because no doubt someone has probably had and resolved this problem. But I have been looking at tutorials and instructions for days and I can’t make any sense of them, so I hope someone doesn’t mind just helping me directly with this. The issue(s):
I started with a blank theme template (Provided by Chris Coyier via Lynda.com) and I’m trying to make a static homepage that has some javascript built into it plus a secondary blog page, which I am calling “News.” That is the gist of it.

Example 1 (http://www.hanoverpilates.com/) is my client’s live static site that I have delivered to her and she is currently using. This was just intended to tide her over while I rework it into a custom WordPress theme, my first WordPress site, btw.

Example 2 (http://koinobori.co/dvlpngsites/hnvrpltswrdprssbase/) is what I intend the homepage and navigation to look like. This is on my own server in a subfolder for now while I finish developing it. It’s just a 2-page site for now. But I want the client to be able to add new pages or modify content as she see’s fit. This example is just a static site, still, with the navigation added in a new menu bar. The news page is just blank for now because I’m just trying to get my head around the navigation issue. I believe that home link in the nav and the logo bring you back to the same index.html link in this example.

Example 3 (http://www.koinobori.co/dvlpngsites/hanoverpilates/), also on my server in a subfolder, is the WordPress theme I’m trying to develop. This is what I want the client’s customers to navigate to when they go to her website. The homepage link in the nav bar does not bring you back to this page, but I want it to. Obviously, I’m not sure why. I want this page to BE the homepage.

In following Chris Coyier’s tutorial on Lynda.com, everything seemed to go swimmingly up to this point. So the error likely occurs in this step (creating a static homepage) or the step before (creating a navigation menu). I created a home.php file, as instructed. When navigating to the site WP seems to completely ignore this. The explanation from the WordPress tutorial I’m following implies that the existence of this page should override index.php as the default page of the site. That does not appear to happen. And the home link in the nav, which I made through the dashboard seems to be a separate entity from the home.php file. I thought it was supposed to take you to the php file I made, now that it exists.

OK, so two things I wish to accomplish, one at a time.
1. Make the default main page and the homepage link be one and the same and ultimately appear as it does in example #2.
2. make sure I have all the javasript in the correct folders, linked and functioning properly for the accordion and the shadowbox slideshow.

I’m very comfortable with HTML and CSS. Not so comfortable with Javascript, though certainly plan on beefing up my understanding as I expect to use it a lot as my web design career developes. Barely touched on comprehension of php, though ditto my plans for Javascript.

Sorry so lengthy a post for a seemingly simple problem. Could really use some troubleshooting help to figure out what I have done wrong or haven’t done. Thanks so much for any help with this.

[TheDoc]

Go into Settings > Reading and set the Home page to ‘Home’ in the drop down and Blog page to ‘News’.

This will enable you to use specific templates in your theme’s directory:

• Home = front-page.php
• News = home.php

  • I know, this one is confusing. ‘home.php’ is actually referring to the blog’s home and not the ‘Home Page’ that we’ve come to term the first page a user sees.

[janusoo]

Thanks Doc! I’ve done as you suggested. Then I changed the name of the home.php file to front-page.php. This seems to have solved the page navigation issue.

Yes, that was confusing. Also reading about making a static page from various forums was confusing. Advice didn’t seem consistent, nor specific to my problem, though I was sure this issue must have been encountered before. Thanks again!

Next: I’m trying to get the news page wrapped in the same DIV as the body of the homepage so that it fits nicely under the nav with the gray background and the black border. If someone looks at my source code, that should be inside a DIV with the id of ‘main’. I just tried moving the opening DIV tag from my front-page.php into my header.php and the closing tag into the footer.php files, but it didn’t seem to have an effect. Not sure why. Index.php and front-page.php were identical up to this point. Does that have anything to do with it?

[janusoo]

Oh, right. So now there’s no home.php file. That’s the one I want to be the News link, right? Can I just make a blank home.php file or do I need to put something in there? And what? Can I get WP to generate the page I need somehow?

[TheDoc]

home.php shouldn’t be blank – it should be what you want to appear on the ‘News’ page, which will generally be a list of your posts!

So you would include your header, footer and possibly a sidebar. And then for your content you can run a basic loop. Look at the results and then adjust from there!

[janusoo]

Well, I’ve learned to use firebug to see what classes and IDs WP is assigning to the PHP generated parts of the site and style them as I like. So now I’ve got the tabs looking right and have managed to apply some styles to the posts. (^o^)/

Any ideas why the image links appear to be broken for the header on the blog page? Also, how do I get the Javascript linked and working properly (See example 3 above.)?

Thanks for any advice on this.

[Author]

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