WordPress content with manual home page?

November 30, 2010 12:38 PM

Can I put a manually updated home page in front of what WordPress generates, using the Thesis theme framework?

I've been tasked with redesigning a horrible magazine web site, which is currently running the Thesis theme for WordPress. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I can't start on this until next year. In the meantime, I told the people whose site it is that we could put up a simple, clean home page that they could manually update with links/blurbs for new articles once a week or so, until the full redesign could happen. The articles would still be posted via WP, and those pages would still have the horrible design, but they'd at least get a decent-looking first impression via the simplified home page.

Sadly, I didn't realize how convoluted Thesis is. It's too modular to be able to just go in and replace the main page template with what I've designed, and WP (which we need to keep running to make the articles accessible) apparently gets in the way of just putting an index.html in the root. So, can anyone tell me either a) how to cut through the Gordian knot of Thesis to get a plain, manually driven home page into the main page template, or b) how to get WordPress to let me put up an unrelated index.html but keep running everything else normally?

posted by aaronetc to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: Under Settings>Reading, can you just choose to display a static page and then create a page that is formatted the way you want by creating a different template for that page?
posted by snofoam at 12:55 PM on November 30, 2010

The problem you'll have is that WordPress expects to own index.php in your htdocs root, which is also where you'll want to put your replacement home page.

Best bet may be to create a new temporary theme and use that instead.

There's lots of issues to do with placing new files at the root of a WP install - the worst of which is that the default directory handler (typically index.php or index.html) will need to be the WordPress loader - otherwise all the other WordPress goodness dies.

The back-end will remain the same - you'll just have a different (temporary) front page.

For a basic theme, you only need two files in it - styles.css and index.php . WP can survive with just those two files.
posted by davemee at 12:57 PM on November 30, 2010

You could put this in your custom_functions.php:

function custom_page_insert() {
   if (is_home() OR is_front_page()) {
       include("manualpage.html");
       die;
   }
   
}

add_action("template_redirect", "custom_page_insert"); 


and put your static manualpage.html in the custom folder.  

posted by backwards guitar at 1:13 PM on November 30, 2010

Response by poster: snofoam - Thanks, that didn't exactly work, but it led me down the path of figuring out what I needed to do to break Thesis in the most helpful way. The site was already set up to use a static page, and the static page was set up to use a custom template framework. That custom template, in turn, just pointed into the guts of Thesis. So, for the time being, I just killed that pointer and put my placeholder page into the custom template, which isn't used by any other pages.
posted by aaronetc at 1:13 PM on November 30, 2010

Hi aaronetc,

If it's possible for you to style the page layouts, you can do this:

Create a new page (select the No Sidebars template if you want to get rid of the sidebars)
Edit the WordPress reading setting and select your new page as the home page.

That should be enough to let you do what you want.
posted by babble at 1:14 PM on November 30, 2010

Alternately, you can create a home.php template that looks the way you want and add it to your theme (assuming one doesn't already exist in Thesis, since I'm not familiar with that theme). If wordpress finds a template called home.php it will use that instead of index.php.
posted by snofoam at 1:14 PM on November 30, 2010

Oh, and there are some forums for thesis that are (or at least once were) pretty good.

DIY Themes Forums

You'll need your login (from when they bought Thesis) to access them, but the responses are usually good.
posted by backwards guitar at 1:15 PM on November 30, 2010

I just saw your comment. The home.php thing in my second comment only works if you don't have a static page selected in the Reading settings. Since you are trying to get away from the Theme, maybe using your own template would be a good way of doing that. Anyhow, sounds like you are on the right track.
posted by snofoam at 1:23 PM on November 30, 2010