When creating WordPress sites for clients, they often require a home page that needs updating but mainly feed from other pages e.g. news, carousels, etc.

Using a full “page” is often OTT as they’ll never create large amounts of content – sometimes it’s just a welcome message.

A great way to set this up then, is to use an over-ride for the default home page (you don’t even need to set to static page or alike).  To do this, simply create a front-page.php page in your template folder and viola – you can now set up your page as you want using your favourite text editor.

Using front-page.php I then add the carousels shortcode, custom code to bring in posts, etc.  As well as create some home-page specific widget areas for the homepage – allowing the editor to still have freedom to add/remove and customise content to produce a regular updated home page.

You could also use home.php but WordPress tends to think this is a variant of index.php and really used for display blogs.  WordPress will look for home before index.

I often find that most of my clients who use WordPress don’t use most of the standard widgets – often because they are using it as a CMS and not a heavy duty Blog.

A lot of the standard widgetst are features for comments, archives and a like.  A while ago I came a function in WordPress that you can use to unregister (and thus hide) these from the WordPress interface for your clients.  I’ve used it for a while but completely forgot until I needed to use it again recently.  So to help others (you lot probably already knew! lol) here’s the code:

As a heads up – you simply drop this into your functions.php in the theme you’re running.

// unregister all widgets
 function unregister_default_widgets() {
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Pages');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Calendar');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Archives');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Links');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Meta');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Search');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Text');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Categories');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Recent_Posts');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Recent_Comments');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_RSS');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Tag_Cloud');
     unregister_widget('WP_Nav_Menu_Widget');
     unregister_widget('Twenty_Eleven_Ephemera_Widget');
 }
 add_action('widgets_init', 'unregister_default_widgets', 11);

Ever wanted to put your latest blog post or maybe even latest 3) on your WordPress home page or maybe another “content” page in your site?  Well here’s a quick snippet of code which allows just that!

You can set how many “latest” blog posts you want (to change the amount just change the number in the entry get_posts(#)) and if you don’t want the full blog content, simply change the_content() to the_excerpt() for the short version;

<?php
         $lastposts = get_posts(1);
         foreach($lastposts as $post) : setup_postdata($post); ?>
               <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
              <?php the_date(); ?><?php comments_popup_link('No Comments &amp;#187;', '1 Comment &amp;#187;', '% Comments &amp;#187;'); ?>
                <?php the_content(); ?>
 <?php endforeach; ?>

For most of my WordPress websites I tend to use an old but superb plugin called “Fold Page List” – this improves the standard WordPress navigation by showing child pages only when in a particular section! Perfect!

But what if I didn’t want to show the “whole navigation” on the left hand side when I went into section?!?!  Well as far as I can see I needed to create/use something custom.

So a search on Google came up with a few results but nothing really seemed to really do what I wanted, until I came across this post from TammyHart Designs – and it worked out perfect!

Made a few tiny tweaks to make sure the code validated so here’s  my reworked code (kudos to TommyHart for the original start though!):

<?php if ( is_page() ) { ?>
            <?php
                if($post->post_parent)
                    $children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->post_parent.'&echo=0'); else
                    $children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->ID.'&echo=0');
                    if ($children) { ?>

                    <h2><?php $parent_title = get_the_title($post->post_parent); echo $parent_title; ?></h2>
                    <ul>
                        <?php echo $children; ?>
                    </ul>
            <?php } ?>
        <?php } ?>

Still not perfect as I only want to show grand-children pages when you click on the child page – exactly what Fold Page list does – so looks like I’ll be doing a tweak to that involving the above really soon