Perth barcamp 2007 – Wordpress loop – Gary Barber

Gary Barber is the Man with no blog and his slides are on slideshare, Doin’ da Loop with da WordPrez

• He promised not to be too technical

• Was going to do it all in lolcat speak
• Presuming know plugins, widgets, can alter source code of WP blog, know what php is, not happy coding, not pulled template apart
• What is the loop
  • Core of Wordpress
  • PHP code distributed thoughout the system
  • Lets you display comments, posts, rest of blog
  • Loop is the single central control point
  • index.php
  • remove index.php – goes back to default theme. Remove default theme after that, then deadibones.

  How does the Loop works:

  • in index.php – middle bit btw header and end
  • 1. If have posts
  • 2. Gets the posts plus post meta data
  • 3. Gets it in the right format
  • 4. Does it over and over.

  Looking at default template

  • If want to make changes to happen after every post – then put it just after the <div> and before the <endwhile>
  • Look at where you add title and permalink

  Then in template div class align..

• The loop is all through wordpress
• Archive, comments
• What can you do with the loop?
  • Customise the loop -display excerpt only
  • Customise CSS for different dates, times, catergories, authors, days of the week (Eg. Things written Tuesday have a blue background)
  • Change home page to static one
  • Can place items between blog posts – put it before the end while

  Before start hacking the code

  • Backup
  • Check to see whether there is a plugin or widget that does the same thing