There are many many ways you can change the look of a specific page on your WordPress site. You can change the content inside the WordPress content editor. You can change the CSS rules that affect the site. Or create a new file in your WordPress theme’s template hierarchy to correspond to the specific page. Or you can use a theme page template designed specifically for that page. The last one is what we’re talking about here. In this tutorial we’ll cover both how to create a WordPress custom page template, and why you might want to do that. We’ll start with the why.

Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress sites, but often grow to do even more. Because of the visual importance, they’re a great place to dive in if you’re interested in getting to the “code-side” of WordPress. I myself “cut my teeth” on WordPress themes back in 2007 and 2008. WordPress themes were where I started to come to grips with the power (and limits) of PHP, CSS, and HTML. So this course is great for newbies, and those just looking to confirm their understanding of the whole system.

In this text and video Quick Guide, we teach you how to show the WordPress template file being used on a given webpage on your site, using the Show Current Template or Which Template plugins.

This article introduces an important concept in WordPress themes: the WordPress get_template_part function. It’s one of the many important concepts of WordPress theme development. Mastering WordPress theme development is an important milestone in understanding WordPress development more generally. (We have a full free course on the topic, check it out.)

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: the WordPress template hierarchy. It’s one of the most important concepts in all of WordPress theme development. (We have a full free course on the topic, check it out.)

If you read my recent article about the template hierarchy, you may have caught this tidbit. If not, you may not have learned that we here at WPShout recently purchased WPHierarchy.com and have been working to update it.

Three major changes in WordPress 4.7 jump out as having the power to significantly transform how I do my work every day.

I’m a bit behind the eight-ball on this. But I’m pretty excited by some of the new theme features that are in the works for WordPress 4.7. The most interesting to me is the new get_theme_file_uri() function, which will be a child-theme aware method of easily linking to your theme resources. Got that? It’s cool because:

The template hierarchy is one of my favorite features in WordPress. It not only makes child themes possible, but it also makes the whole ecosystem better because more code can be written to sit in smaller and smaller chunks. This is great. What’s also cool about it is that it’s all enabled by a few relatively small chunks of code. But staring at them starts to expose us to some of the most interesting parts of WordPress.

I have a confession to make: for a long time I’ve been scared of Genesis.