front page won’t change templates
What is your setup for front page in Settings > Reading ? Do you have front-page.php template in your theme? It will pretty much override anything, no matter what you choose in settings.
frontpage
How to access the so called “Posts page”
http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_Screen “Posts page – Select in the drop-down box the name of the Page that will now contain your Posts. If you do not select a Page here, your Posts will only be accessible via other navigation features such as category, calendar, or archive links. Even if the selected Page is Password protected, visitors will … Read more
plugin: ‘init’ hook, check if we’re not in admin
init is too early for conditional tags to work. It marks when core finished loading, but no environment is set up yet. For admin area only you can hook into admin_init. For conditionals on front end earliest hook you can reliable use is template_redirect.
What is the advantage of using home.php over index.php for the front page
If you look here [is_home vs is_front_page] you’ll see that is_front_page() is true regardless of what the homepage is set to in the WordPress settings. This means that if you don’t plan on releasing this publicly (i.e. short-run usage) then just having a front-page.php should suffice. is_home() is set based on your blogs page (which … Read more
Front page welcome message area
Create a page theme, then call it in index.php: $recent = new WP_Query( ‘page_id=**ID**’ ); while ( $recent->have_posts() ) : $recent->the_post(); ?><h3><?php the_title(); ?></h3><?php the_content(); endwhile;
How to display only sticky posts on my automatically generated front page?
WordPress saves sticky posts inside the option named sticky_posts. You can retrieve them via get_option(‘sticky_posts’). With that knowledge it is possible to change the query to only query for sticky posts, you usually do so via the pre_get_posts hook. add_action(‘pre_get_posts’, ‘WPSE_home_only_stickies’); function WPSE_home_only_stickies($query) { // only run for homepage & main query if ($query->is_home() && … Read more
No posts on front page
You don’t say if you are on wordpress.com or self-hosted, or which theme you are using. Does it help to look at WordPress display posts shortcode and put [display-posts] into your page content? https://en.support.wordpress.com/display-posts-shortcode/ If you are self-hosting and your theme supports it (most do), the Display Posts plugin enables and extends this function to … Read more
How to make my homepage automatically redirect to an external website?
Maybe it can help: Go to Plugins -> Add New Search for “Page Links To” plugin Install and activate it Create new post/page or edit an existing one Scroll down to Page Links To tab Choose “A Custom URL” radio button Enter any URL you want Choose if you want to open link in a … Read more
Stop Authors from submitting spam post
If your really worried I would probably create custom write panels or custom meta boxes tied into custom post types. That way you can make the custom post types based on user role and control what shows up very easily. For instance you can make a custom post type called “tweens” with the user role … Read more
Static front page with excerpt
This plugin should help you. It ads the Excerpt Meta box to the Edit Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-excerpts-for-wordpress-three/ Good luck!