Creating a dynamic home page in WordPress

Hang on to your hats, because this is not a HOWTO-style post. This is a tribute to one of my readers.

Remember the code I showcased to make WordPress into a CMS with a regular front page? Michael, one of the commenters in that post, has used that advice to innovate.

Michael turned the snippet of code around. The result? A very elegant home page for his NYC Educated blog. His home page includes a mini-loop with posts, and other items of interest, while still pulling a static page in the front.

Moreover, he used the specific advice of adding a link to his blog via the /page/1/ trick.

Go there and check it out for yourself. Check the top navigation bar. A nice home page, clean navigation URLs and a blog, to boot. Go learn and see how it’s done. Couldn’t get any better than that.

Or could it? I challenge you to improve on this!

7 Responses to “Creating a dynamic home page in WordPress”

  1. Educated Says:

    The Real Ultimate Static Front Page

    With WordPress, there have been so many attempts to make the best static front page. Most variations have included plugins that change the default behavior of the home page to display a pre-selected WordPress page. However, the Turbocharged blog showca…

  2. Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress Blogs Says:

    Creating Static Front Page in Wordpress 2.1…

    Wordpress 2.1 enables you to create a static front or index page from within the Wordpress admin panel. Another super useful feature from the new version of Wordpress. It is so easy a caveman can do it!

    Prior to Wordpress 2.1 this was made possible by…

  3. tankgurl Says:

    hats off to you both for doing brilliant work! i’m a newbie trying to clean up basic code for my site, and so far, there’s only one glitch that i can’t seem to work through.

    i have the same “next/previous entries” links at the footer of my site. if i’m at /page/1/ of my blog, it’s no problem. but when i’m on /page/2/ and i click on the “next entries” link, it goes to, predictably, my static “home” page, and not back to /page/1/ as i would like it. i know this has something to do with wordpress code, but i’m still trying to figure that out.

    any pointers?

  4. Rudd-O Says:

    Yeah, I hit the same barrier. The solution would be to detect that condition (for example, by saving the hyperlink to a variable instead of printing it, then using strpos() to find /page/) and if the link doesn’t have the /page/ string, then appending it manually. It’s hell, I know. Another alternative would be to write a plugin that modified the output of the next/previous entries hyperlinks.

  5. tankgurl Says:

    thanks for the quick reply. as things progress, i (or somebody else, most probably) will hit a solution.

  6. Educated Says:

    Implementing The Real Ultimte Front Page…

    Previously, I briefly illustrated how using a home.php file can allow you to build a custom layout to your WordPress blog’s home page. However, I didn’t really document it well enough for the casual WP user to implement by himself. For the …

  7. locjan Says:

    thanks, looking for this article, its very useful. but did you know how to make portal for wordpress (like portal for smf)

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