wp_nav_menu has the argument fallback_cb, which is the function called if a menu doesn’t exist. This is set to wp_page_menu by default, which is why you see a list of pages if the menu doesn’t exist. If you explicitly set that to false, then nothing will be output if the menu doesn’t exist. EDIT- Given … Read more
User Rarst has a very famous answer where he lays out the load process. Looking at this graph whenever wp-blog-header.php gets loaded it calls function wp() which sets up many of WordPress globals like $post and $wp_query. ( Secondary Reference by User Gmazzap ) That’s the technical side of things but it looks like the … Read more
WooCommerce uses the template_include filter/hook to load main templates like archive-product.php and single-product.php. And here’s the class which handles main templates. And there’s a filter in that class which you can use to capture the default file (name) which WooCommerce loads based on the current request/page — e.g. single-product.php for single product pages. You can’t, … Read more
You really don’t need much. A headline with id=comments <h2 id=”comments”><?php comments_number(); ?></h2> This will be the target for comments_link() in the article loop. Links for paginated comments. Usually, I put these links into a function and call the function above and below the comments list: class TTT_Template { function comment_pager() { if ( get_comment_pages_count() … Read more
Stop WordPress to run main query is hard: you have to dig inside the deep heart of WordPress. WordPress frontend workflow: wp-blog-header.php call the function wp() wp() function creates an instance of wp class, and call main() method on it main() method code: public function main($query_args=””) { $this->init(); $this->parse_request($query_args); // build query vars starting from … Read more
WordPress 4.7 introduces a new filter that allows us to easily modify the template hierarchy: /** * Filters the list of template filenames that are searched for when retrieving * a template to use. * * The last element in the array should always be the fallback * template for this query type. * * … Read more
This is the technique I’m using on a site right now. It involves registering a query var for “template”, and registering an endpoint called /contact, which rewrites internally to ?template=contact. Then you just check for that query variable at the template_redirect hook, and if its present, include the page template you want to load and … Read more
To provide a default template that can be overwritten by a theme hook into template_include like the linked questions suggest. You get the template WordPress wants to use as a parameter. If that is not the file you want – replace it with your plugin’s file: add_filter( ‘template_include’, ‘wpse_57232_render_cpt’, 100 ); /** * Provide fall … Read more
You can do that with single_template filter. First you will need to check if a post belongs to a top level category. So here is the function. // custom single template for specific category function wpse_custom_category_single_template( $single_template ) { global $post; // get all categories of current post $categories = get_the_category( $post->ID ); $top_categories = … Read more
Setting page to be “posts page” changes its template hierarchy to follow home page rules. So your custom template is ignored and it looks for home.php or index.php, which might or might not be the reason it fails to render.