Schinckel.net

(This is an extension on the previous post). One of the major drawbacks of Blogsome is the handling of Pages _is not complete. You can create and manage Pages, but the display of them is sub-standard: there is no page.html template file as there is for _Posts _(post.html). However, I have figured out a stop-gap method of running pages through a template. I tried first to do this by adding a _Custom Field, as noted in the WordPress Codex, called _wp_page_template, and setting this value to post.html. This did not work, mainly (as far as I could tell) because the value did not ‘stick’. This seems to be a known issue with WordPress 1.5.1. I was able to get enclosure Custom Fields to work (almost: they only ever appeared to be an Array). The next way I figured out how to do it was by finding a variable that has a different value when a Page is being rendered, as opposed to a Post or Index, or Category, or Archive. The variable I discovered is {$smarty.server.SCRIPT_NAME}. This appears as '/wp-inst/pages' or '/wp-inst/index.php' under Blogsome. Fantastic! My next step was to have the following code where {$content} used to be in the Main Page Template:

    {if $smarty.server.SCRIPT_NAME == '/wp-inst/pages'}
        {assign var=page value=true}
        {capture name=the_content}{$content} {/capture}
        {include file='post.html'}
    {else}
        {assign var=page value=false}
        {$content}	
    {/if}

The first line, the {if} clause, finds out if it is indeed a page. The second line assigns ‘true’ to the variable {$page}, just as a way of making it less cumbersome to test again later. The third line stores the text that would normally appear in the body of the Page into the variable {$smarty.capture.the_content}. This will be used in place of {$the_content} in the post.html template. The fourth line puts the contents of the post.html file into the HTML stream. Just to be safe, I set the value of {$page} to false before the post.html file gets called normally by the {$content} tag. Then, in the post.html template file, I added the following code:

• Where the content needs to go: {if $page == 'true'}{$smarty.capture.the_content}{$content}{/if}{the_content} There is no {else} required here, as {the_content} has no value.
• Where the Post Title normally is, I made it: <a href="{if $page == 'true'}{$Smarty.server.PHP_SELF}{else}{permalink_link}{/if}" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: {if $page == 'true'}{single_post_title}{/if}{the_title_rss}">{if $page == 'true'}{single_post_title}{/if}{the_title}</a> Basically, this replaces {permalink_link} by the URL of the current Page. I’ll have a bit of a think about how multi-page documents work if I can get them working. It replaces the {the_title} value by {single_post_title}, which works quite nicely.
• I also made it so that the Date information is replaced by a Non-Breaking Space - in my template this means that a nice coloured box appears where the Date normally goes: this box is too small otherwise. {if $page == 'true'} {/if} The date data will be empty, so this should work okay.
• Finally, I used {if $page != 'true'} ... {/if} to remove information that was not pertinant to a Page, such as the Post time, number of comments, category and so on. I also needed to have the {edit_post_link} skipped in this manner.

I have not yet made comments work properly: I’m not sure that this can be done with this hack, but they will not appear if you just do the things I’ve shown above. If you {include file=comments.html}, you will get the Comment Closed Notification.