A Path Less Taken

As we push our way through the process of building a WordPress theme, it’s easy to get bogged down in little details and lose site of the big picture. If we are patient and search, we can uncover a lot of useful content on the WordPress site. Just take a look at the information here. About 3/4 of the way down the page you will find the Theme Template Files List. This list is useful as a high level road map for building your first theme.

Finally an easy one. The 404 error page (Page Not Found) is pretty easy to make. It’s just a very stripped down version of your index.php file without all that bothersome content in it. First you create a file in your theme folder named 404.php. Then you open the file for editing. Now enter the following content into the file.

Comments, comments, comments. What blog is really complete without comments? One of the hallmarks of a unique WordPress theme is the way it handles comments. That’s why we are diving into this important topic. As usual my timing is either awesome or terrible, but I honestly can’t tell. With the recent release of WordPress 2.7 there was a significant overhaul of the comments system. Threaded (nested) comments were included which is a major step forward. Also, the comments loop was notably improved. For more details in the words of the WordPress team you can check here.

When I said in Part 1 that I was going to “track my progress through the creation process” I was serious. So if you have been following this series of posts faithfully then you have made some mistakes. I know this because I have made some mistakes. That’s ok. It’s all part of the creative process. So I decided to take a quick pause, fix our mistakes and outline our next steps.

The Loop. The WordPress Loop is a concept that some non-programmers struggle with. My goal here is to explain it in simple enough terms that you can understand how it works and use it effectively. I’m not going to look at the individual functions in great detail like we did in the previous posts. Instead you are going to have a homework assignment that will (if you do it) make you a much stronger WordPress theme builder. So without further preamble let’s dive into some code!