BLOG DESIGN SOLUTIONS The Page now has a headline, which should read Archives, although the Page itself is probably rather empty. If you want to write a small introduction or a set of instructions for your Archives page, go right ahead and edit the Page content. Regardless of how you end up using the various parts to form your template, starting out by looking at what Kubrick does is probably a good idea. The template files that make up Kubrick can be found at /wp-content/themes/default/). Let s now talk about custom templates and, more importantly, how we can bend them to our will. Advanced templating in WordPress Where do we turn when the techniques we have outlined are just not cutting it? What if we want just one of our Pages to have a blue background while the rest of them have white backgrounds? What happens when we want to add a page to our site that doesn t have anything to do with our posts or categories? Again we turn to templates, but this time to a lesser known subset of templates: custom templates. Templates, posts, Pages, and plug-ins There are a number of strictly defined templates in WordPress. But there is also another category of templates that can be anything, can be called anything, and can be applied to any Page you create in WordPress. The fun begins with custom templates. It is a little-known fact that you can apply custom templates to blank Pages in WordPress. What this means is that you can create a completely blank Page in WordPress and then apply a custom theme template laden with code to it. As an example let s look at the archives page at Chris s site Sillyness Spelled Wrong Intentionally (www.chrisjdavis.org/archive/). If you were to look at the page via the WordPress admin, the Page content area would be completely blank. If you then opened the custom template, you would see a whole mess o code, and interestingly enough the_loop would be nowhere to be found. In fact, the only WordPress core code that you would find would be get_header(); and get_footer(); . The rest is either embedded code or plug-in calls. So let s get into some code Our first step is to create the custom template that will be applied to the Archives page. Because we do not want to reinvent the wheel, we ll be making use of Shawn Grimes Clean Archives plug-in (www.sporadicnonsense.com/files/srg_clean_archives_1.5.zip)

Now this code is working (you should go ahead and test it, just to make sure). If you have a brand spanking new install of WordPress you probably won t see much change because you don t have any content that isn t in the current month. Don t worry, though, because when you do have months and years worth of content this will be a great trick to employ. Now we can move along to the main column of the Page. We don t want to hard code the name of the Page into the HTML; instead we want to read the name of the WordPress Page. This is easily done because Pages (being little more than static blog entries) use the same Loop as your normal blog. Replace with the following lines of code:

BLOG DESIGN SOLUTIONS You should see a web page similar to Figure 5-4. Figure 5-4. The Colophon page as your visitors would see it That is to say, it works. It s not a particularly interesting page, but we re about to remedy that with a little bit of code magic. Open up a new blank document in your favorite editor and save it as colophon.php in your default theme folder. Now let s get on to adding some shine to this dull page. Editing the Page First, open up with the standard template file header. It is important to name your custom templates something descriptive because WordPress will label each one by reading the Template Name line.