Like a typical opensource effort, WordPress is a mixed bag. It’s wonderful for scripters like me to get so much access to the source. But the documentation and concepts are opaque, and this is coming from a seasoned IT veteran. Could they have possibly made it more complicated?
I hope to help you cut through the inscrutable explanations on such pages as http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags and cut to the chase for knowing how to change what matters, whether or not, like me, you really understand what the heck they’re talking about.
Say you want to modify something in the appearance of your posts. That’s what I wanted. Once I learned the “easy way” to install plugins (see http://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2011/06/security-considerations-for-wordpress-plugins-and-upgrades/), I wanted to get a plugin to count the millions of expected visitors, ha, ha!
Now more comfortable with plugins, I actually installed WP-PostViews using my SmartPhone. Cool, right? Except that I found installation is one thing, configuring it to actually do something another. Fortunately, I do have a PhD in a technical field, so I refused to be daunted.
I wanted to display the view count above or below each post. From the exceedingly poor documentation available on WP-PostViews, I gathered that I needed to insert this php code:
<?php if(function_exists('the_views')) { the_views(); } ?> |
into one or more of my template files to display the view count. The (incorrect) PostViews documentation said just put it into index.php, inside the section
<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?> |
Great. That simply doesn’t exist in my index.php in my theme (twentyten).
So now we’re looking at all these files in that directory, wp-content/themes/twentyten, to figure out which may be the right one:
404.php comments.php loop-attachment.php page.php tag.php
archive.php footer.php loop-page.php search.php
attachment.php functions.php loop.php sidebar-footer.php
author.php header.php loop-single.php sidebar.php
category.php index.php onecolumn-page.php single.php |
As I promised I’ll cut through all the bluster about themes, templates, hierarchies and other WordPress nonsense. My degree is in experimental physics. I experiment. By experimentation and some tiny understanding of their concepts I can now say you need to change these two files:
loop.php loop-single.php
That’s it. I just saved you three hours of useless research.
Update
I see they try to make it easier for you by allowing you to edit the template files from within the admin GUI, including some function documentation. It still leaves a lot to be desired.
To be continued…