Chasing the Walrus - A Blog Development

[walrus]

Probably one of the most time consuming part of setting up a blog is deciding on a theme and editing a template. I literally go bug eyed doing it but a great place to start looking for your theme is the WordPress Theme Viewer. Probably somewhere near 1000 themes all with preview.

You can also search for WP themes and come up with some really nice ones that aren't listed in the theme viewer.

Once you select a theme, before you do anything else, check that it is html compliant. Many aren't. Also, check that it is optimized so that your post information comes up first before any of the sidebar information does. Many 3 column themes suffer from this problem. If you find issues with the theme, you'll have to decide if you can correct the problems or whether you should search out a different theme.

Since 90% of the themes available are variations of previously published themes, you can usually find other themes that might not be as close to what you are looking for but similar enough that you can make them into what you want.

While the template files will vary greatly depending on the specific theme, here is a list of some of the most common and what their uses are:
404.php - Customizable 404 message for posts that may have been deleted from your blog.

archive.php - File used for both archives and category recall and recalls the complete list of posts. If you want to have different templates for your category this would be the file that you copy to do that. In order to limit duplicate content worries I like to replace

<?php the_content() ?>

in this file with

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

. You can either define the excerpt in the post editors optional excerpt field or it will use the first 55 words of the post.

archives.php - Usually a part of the sidebar, this returns a list of the archives in question (month, day, year, category, etc.) as opposed to the posts as above.

attachment.php - I haven't ever used attachments to my posts but if I did, this is where I would edit to change the look of the attachment.

comments.php -
comments-popup.php -
I'm not sure about the dynamics with these two files. I know comments.php is called from single.php and comments-popup.php is called from index

footer.php - Adds the information to the bottom of the page and closes out your template. Be sure to edit in all of your copyright information.

functions.php - Used by some templates in the admin area to allow manipulation of basics in the header file.

header.php - Yep, your header information area. I'm going to say most WP templates do not have meta keywords or descriptions in the header. I'll discuss in a future post how I deal with adding them (not that it's the best, it's just mine) but you can also use plug-ins like Wordpress Meta Tag Generator to add these.

index.php - All of your main page blog post information is here.

page.php - This is the default template for a page display. You can assign a different template on a page by page basis if you ever find the need. Since I like to use sponsor feeds on pages (as opposed to blog posts), I'll copy and edit this since some sponsors haven't learned that some affiliates like to use fixed width, 3 column themes which can't display pictures larger than 350 px wide without blowing up the theme.

search.php - Self explanatory, this is the template that is used to display search results

searchform.php - This template formats your search bar

sidebar.php - Your sidebar. On some themes you may have a sideone.php and a sidetwo.php.

single.php - Single post display

style.css - Your style sheet

and from Ultimate Tag Warrior

tag.php - If you use this you can have a separate template for when someone clicks on one of your tags. Otherwise it seems to use the main index template. I use this much like the archive template as described above so that my tag archives only display excerpts and not full posts

tags.php - Used as a page to make a tag cloud page

searchtags.php - Used in tags.php to add a search function for your tag cloud.

I'll most likely get into more detail on some of these as I begin to setup my template but for now I think I've covered the basics on most of the templates in a basic theme.