On the home page, the default theme features the FULL TEXT from each post. I prefer to only show the first 40 or 50 words with a MORE link… but that requires a CHANGE to the template, so I won’t tell you how to do that now. We’ll leave that for later cos it’s harder!
Now on the Home page, About page, Search Results page, Archive page and Category page, you’ll notice there’s a bar down the right hand side of the screen – it’s called the SIDEBAR – and it contains navigation links etc.
However, if you look at any page with a full POST on it… the sidebar is gone, replaced by a description of the post, and a COMMENTS form (if comments are turned on for that post) – both of which appear after the post.
And at the TOP of the POSTS page… you’ll also see LINKS to the NEXT and PREVIOUS posts made, and these use the TITLE of the post to describe the link. These are sometimes missing in other template files, so remember you can copy this code from the page.php page into a different template to make it happen there!
In the SIDEBAR under the CATEGORIES heading, you’ll see a list of all the categories that have PUBLISHED posts in them, and with this template, a number in brackets (5) AFTER the category heading to show how many posts there are. I think this is a useful feature, but it’s often missing in templates you download.
Now basically, these “features” are all specified in several files contained in the WordPress THEMES directory (on your web server).
Each theme has it’s own folder within that directory. If you want to change your theme, you WILL need to edit these files.
So let’s have a look at how to do that now.
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