Using the Front Page’s Special Features

Posted by Bryan on September 6, 2009 under Using The Theme | 2 Comments to Read

First, if you don’t want to use the fancy front page, just delete the file called home.php from your server and the theme will revert to a traditional blog formatted site. Or, you can specify a page as the opening page of your site under Admin > Settings > Reading and the page.php file will automatically override the home.php file.

To use the featured areas on the front page, you’ll use the Custom Fields feature of WordPress.

To use the main featured area (the wider area at the top)…

1. Create a category with any name you’d like, such as “Featured Articles.”

2. Under Admin > Manage > Categories, you will see your new category listed. Mouseover it and in the status bar of your browser, you’ll see a long URL that ends with ID=#, where # will be the unique category id.

3. Under Design > Theme Editor, you’ll see a list of files on the right. Select home.php from the list to edit it.

4. Add your featured category’s id as shown below…

5. Click “Update File.”

Add an image to your Featured Post

The square image to the left of the featured content on the front page is created using the Custom Fields feature. It’s very easy…

1. Upload an image, either using the “Add media” feature (you can insert the photo into your post, but adding it to the front page is still a separate process) or an ftp client.

2. Get the full URL to the image.

3. Under Custom Fields in the post editor, type in a Key of “Featured.” (You’ll only have to do this one time, Featured will be an available option in the drop down menu from then on.)

4. Add the URL to your image in the box to the right.

Configuring the Smaller Front Page Featured Areas

The two boxes shown on the demo are adjusted in a very similar way as the Featured Box. Decide which categories will be used in these boxes and add their category id’s in the home.php file.

The difference is that to generate the thumbnail, you’ll still use the custom fields, as above, but this time your “Key” will be “Thumbnail” instead of “Featured.” Again, you only have to enter this word once and then it becomes available in the dropdown.