Newb needs help with 5.5.1

Most of your style will be in a file called syle.css. WordPress uses a development style called DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). The Headers, footers, and sidebar have their own files named footer.php,header.php, and Sidebar.php. The command that loads them are get_header(), get_footer(), and get_sidebar(). Each page type like single, post, archive,404 have their own template. There a plugin in the plugin repository called show theme which will show you which template is being used for the page you are viewing. There are some nice courses you can take from Linkin and Udemy. I would recommend taking Luis Ramirez Jr course on Udemy. He covers a great deal of material. If you wait the price will probably drop to around $10 or $11. Don’t purchase it when it at $100 or $200. Udemy drops the price to around a $11 every 2 or 3 weeks. Just wait for the drop in price before purchasing it.

if you want to add styles please do it in the customizer. If you click on the customizer at the bottom you will see a section for custom styles. You can click it and add your style there. Don’t add them to the Style.css file. If you do they will probably be overwritten when your theme is updated.

Thank you!

+1 for mentioning Udemy. In fact I have found a free course at Udemy specifically designed using 5.5.1, by a gentleman called KC Tan: https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-wordpress-online-updated/learn/lecture/8502390?components=purchase%2Ccacheable_buy_button%2Cbuy_button%2Crecommendation#content

Hopefully by the end this will deliver some enlightenment. I’m frankly baffled by, for example, the so-called “Page Title”: it doesn’t seem as though this is contained in a “block”, since the “block editing” tab goes blank if you selected this text. Nor is it the same as HTML TITLE tag (which just changes the words at the top of the browser frame). Is it, I wonder, at all possible to change the formatting of this “title” font at all? But if I get rid of it, the page becomes “no name”, presumably not so good from an SEO angle. Do I therefore set it to “display: none”? I haven’t got the faintest idea.

I’ve done plenty of editing of HTML, CSS and PHP (and Javascript), so hopefully this won’t be a total block for me. I find it quite strange, however, that you have to get down and dirty with this technical stuff to fulfil fairly basic formatting requirements.

I really think, also, that it is incumbent on designers to produce new and comprehensive documentation, particularly when a major upgrade turns everything upside down (as appears to be the case with v5.5), and particularly when things are anything but intuitive. I’m still looking for the WordPress 5.5.1 API documentation… I presume I’ll be looking for a long long time.

WordPress uses a loop to pull data from the database. When the loop executes it goes through each post and displays the information. If you execute one of the commands outside of the loop WordPress will look at a global variable $post to see what stored there. It will probably be the last thing accessed by WordPress and not what you intended. Some template tags can be run outside of the loop while others need to be executed inside the loop. All your data lives in your database, not in the templates. When information is requested WordPress looks to see which template it needs to use to display the information. If it can’t find a template it falls back to index.php. Index.php is the last stop for all Templates. It the catch-all for anything that doesn’t have a template created. There is a chart called the WordPress hierarchy it shows the order in which templates are called within a theme. Blocks and Plugins are not part of your template. They live outside of your template. If you change templates it has no effect on your blocks or plugins unless the template has build-in support for them. You will find this will happen for plugins like woo-commerce. Many themes are built for this plugin. Also, you have Page builders which are plugins that create pages and layouts for themes. It best if you spend some time studying it before trying to do a lot of modifications.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by mrtom414.