How To Create a Pseudo One Page site in Wordpress Pt 1

For a recent project I really need to create a one page site for a new church “plant.” They really had minimal content and information, but needed a nice web presence. It also needed to be easily editable by them, and the church needed a blog.

I decided to give it a shot with Wordpress, and I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out. Here are the basic tools/techniques I used to pull it off.

1) First I needed a non-traditional blog site with a static front page. This is fixed easily enough in the Wordpress dashboard. Go to “Reading” and select a page to use as your static page. Below that, you will need to select a second page to use as your Blog home-page. I created a new page called “Blog” for my purposes, but use what works for you.

2) This creates a couple problems that are solved fairly easily. First, this places a second “Home” link in the navigation.

To fix this navigate to your Header.php file (and possibly your Footer.php if it also contains navigation). Look for this code:

<?php wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’); ?><br />

Add in the condition &exclude=x where “x” equals the page number(s) that need to be excluded. So one excluded page would look like this:

<?php wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&exclude=4&title_li=’); ?><br />

and multiple would look like this:

<?php wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&exclude=1,4,11&title_li=’); ?><br />

At this point your navigation should look nice and pretty with only one “Home” link

FYI, to find the page number, just navigate to “Pages” and click to edit that page. At the end of the address in your browser bar you will see “post=x.” That is your page number.

Next: Removing the sidebar on selected pages.