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WordPress WordPress Theme Development Adding a Blog to a WordPress Theme Setting up the Blog Homepage

James Carney
James Carney
16,255 Points
Posted by James Carney
James Carney
16,255 Points

Which template to use for home.php

Hey Zac. I was watching your video for setting up a blog template, and I know I am supposed to use home.php for the main part of the blog. What I am running into is: In this video "Setting Up the Blog Homepage" though, you use 2 different existing templates to make your home.php. You use single-portfolio.php for the template to save as home.php around the 1 minute mark. Then you immediately say we should save page-sidebar-left.php as home.php at 1:15.

Not sure which one we should go with. I'm assuming page-sidebar-left.php, but I want some clarification on this.

2 Answers

Ernest Guaimano
Ernest Guaimano
14,928 Points
Ernest Guaimano
Ernest Guaimano
14,928 Points

Use the page-sidebar-left.php file as a starting point for your home.php file. This is what is used throughout the remainder of this tutorial section.

James Carney
James Carney
16,255 Points
James Carney
James Carney
16,255 Points

Yeah... Took a couple times watching the video, but that's what I ended up using for the rest of it and it worked fine.

Bob Sutherton
Bob Sutherton
20,160 Points
Bob Sutherton
Bob Sutherton
20,160 Points

I'm not sure if you are trying to build the site exactly as Zac is or not. But if not, all you really need in the home.php template is the header, the footer, and the loop that calls your blog posts. Also, you can add an include for a sidebar if you want to but it would be up to you.

I bet this probably doesn't answer your question if you are trying to duplicate the site Zac is building. If you compare the differences between the

page-sidebar-left.php

and the...

single-portfolio.php

the only major differences you will probably see relate to the sidebar and where is sits in the markup.

Hope this helps or you have probably figured it out by now since this post is a day old.