Understanding what home.php and index.php do

This gets everyone confused so it’s best to explain what these two templates are used for. index.php is the core of a template, WP will use it where ever it can except when it finds a more suitable template file, so for example if your trying to view a date it will look for a date template first then if it can’t find that it will look for an archive template and then finally the index.php template. What’s important to understand here is that this is not the home page rather just the core template file and is only used if wp needs to use it! Home.php is a home page template and will be called as the home page template if it exists.

Changing the home page to a static page

WordPress allows you to change the home page to a page of your choosing and also a page for the posts. What’s important to note here is that neither one is required. So for example you can choose your home page but don’t need to specify one for your posts this is the core part of using WP as a CMS as you’re unlikely to have just one page of posts unless you just want a blog but perhaps you want both a blog and press release centre and also some other dynamic content. Leaving that option off will allow much better control of your content.

Homepage doesn’t have static content

If your homepage is like mine then you don’t need a static page at all as all your content is coming from the various sections of the site. In this case you just need to build a shit hot index.php file with custom loops.

What about index.php?

So if you haven’t specified a posts page what happens to index.php? Well it doesn’t get used for a page no more it gets called when WP needs it (as it should be). So if you query a bunch of posts like /category/news/ then it will call the category.php file if you have one or if not then it will resort to the index.php file. Simple huh?

Conclusion

WP kicks ass a CMS and Blogging platform, but as with most things on the web there is more than one day to do things, you could use a static page if your home page is copy heavy and needs to edited like a page, or if your home page is just a bunch of links and categories much like a news site or a personal site like mine then you just need to make your index.php (or home.php if you want to have a truely unique home page) to reflect this. The problem is that this is not easily achievable by all, it takes someone with some concept of HTML/PHP. But hopefully this article will assist some developers out-there with there next client project.

A better solution!

Ideally though it would be much better if WordPress supported sections whereby you could assign your categories, pages, and posts to a section. So for example you would your have default section which is what WordPress has right now, and then you could create another one called Blog and one called Portfolio and then assign pages like archives, hire me etc and other content. Best of all you could have proper hierarchy structure much like /portfolio/category/web/ or /portfolio/2010/ instead of everything being relative to the site root.

Problems?

Of course like all web applications this isn’t 100% fool-proof. There  will be issues depending on how you structure your site, but all of them can be easily overcome using a variety of conditional tags.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

coming soon