What no one seems to mention out there anywhere is that if you ever want to use a custom template page for your blog posts page, it absolutely has to be named “home.php”. I had no trouble with this when I set up sites using Twenty Ten as a parent theme so I’m not really sure if it’s a Twenty Eleven thing or not. I screwed around for more than two days trying to get the posts page to load a custom template. I searched all over the WordPress codex and hundreds of other sites trying to find information on this topic but it was a comment on the WordPress beta info that gave me the idea to try it. I don’t even remember where I read it now and can’t find it again either, but you would think that is an important bit of information that should be included on the I changed my “front-page.php” template to “home.php” and POOOF!… My custom template loaded in my posts page instantly! Unbelievable.
I love WordPress and pretty much switched to it as a CMS exclusively 3 or 4 years ago after working with Drupal, Joomla and others. I found it to be super easy to work with, easy to customize, and it gets better every year. The documentation on certain things just sucks though! Whenever there’s some kind of custom and tricky feature or function that I want to work into my theme, I end up finding it on any site except WordPress Codex. There are a few folks out there that really know WordPress and quite a few that led me down the wrong path several times, but usually I can find what I’m looking for by combining and comparing several sources. This kind of stuff is what should be right up front on the Codex site for all of us trying to figure this out on our own. To their credit though, they do provide a lot of information if you know where to look and they provide it for free since this is an open source platform, so I would be an ass to fault them too much for my problems. In the end, I still choose WP to build my sites for it’s stability and flexibility.
Right now I’m just trying to finish tweaking this Twenty Eleven child theme to suit my needs and make my site function the way I need it to, and when I get a bit further into it I will post another update on the progress of building a custom site using Twenty Eleven.
