Today an issue came up where a reader of one of a site I manage was referring to content that was out of date. Normally that’s not a problem but in this case it is a timely pandemic documentation page where the content is very likely to be out of date within a couple months if its not routinely updated.
To solve this challenge I decided to write a small function that will check the last modified date of a post and place an alert below the title and above the content. That notice would read…
This page has not been updated in 60 days. The information below may be outdated.
Which is a casual way of alerting the reader that if this information is timely perhaps check elsewhere on the site for a newer post. Likewise, if that person is looking for an older post they can safely disregard the notice. posting a discrete notice can come in handy depending on the context that brought a reader to the post.
Functions.php
<?php
// If post is older than 60 days return true
function jd_is_old_post($days = 60 ) {
$days = (int) $days;
$offset = $days*60*60*24;
if ( get_post_modified_time() < date('U') - $offset )
return true;
return false;
}
?>
Place within the WordPress Loop
<?php
// If post is older than 60 days display this notice
if ( jd_is_old_post() ) {
echo '<div class="old-post-notice">';
echo '<p><strong>This page has not been updated in 60 days. The information below may be outdated.</p></strong>';
echo '</div>';
}
?>
Registering a sidebar gives our theme an area where dynamic content can be added by Widgets and managed by the site owner using a drag an drop interface. This can include menus, custom HTML, Images and additional features introduced by Plugins.
In this post we’ll register a sidebar, that will then be assigned dynamic widgets and displayed on our site’s footer.
functions.php
Registering a sidebar adds the Widgets option to our Appearance menu which didn’t appear previously. By registering a sidebar we also enable this feature in the WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > WidgetsRegister a Sidebar in functions.php
// Register a Sidebar
register_sidebar(
array(
'id' => 'footer',
'name' => __( 'Footer', 'textdomain' ),
'description' => __( 'Displays in the footer on the left side', 'textdomain'),
)
);
Once we’ve registered the sidebar we can assign content to our Footer widget.
Assigning Categories and Pages to the Footer widget
footer.php
Next we’ll want to display that sidebar so we’ll use the conditional tagis_active_sidebar() to check if any widgets have been assigned. If that check passes WordPress will display the widgets. By running a check such as this we prevent WordPress from adding empty HTMLtags to the page. This also helps us with accessibility later.
Adding or Registering menus to a WordPress website has frequently been a challenge which is why I believe it deserves its own post as we learn about register_nav_menus() then adding those Navigation Menus to our theme.
At first glance the process appears simple, add a function to functions.php to “register” the menus.
If you’d like to glance the complete files visit this snippet.
Where registering menus gets gets tricky is if there is a mismatch between the registration and the template file that hooks it into the page. If wp_nav_menu() doesn’t find the desired menu WordPress displays a fallback… In this case the only page on my website Sample Page. Since this isn’t expressed as an error we’re not really sure what’s wrong here. Only that its not the expected result.
These aren’t the the menus you are looking for
However, if things work outour assigned menu will display properly.
Assigning our menu to Header and Footer Display locations
The assigned menus we’re expecting
Template Tags
Until thiss point our theme hasn’t generated any html beyond a paragraph tag in the Welcome post.
However, wp_nav_menu() is one of many Template Tags that WordPress provides by to help designers and developers customize our website.
Not just unordered lists and list items are inserted but custom classes as well.
In the image above which inspects the menus list links you’ll note a class of current_page_item which could be used to differentiate the current page as it appears in the menu. All without custom JavaScript. A feature that will be handy later when we plan our our design and accessibility features.
Creating a WordPress theme only requires three files. style.css, index.php, functions.php. However since we’ll be needing them later lets include header.php and footer.php.
Some of the code samples get a little busy in this section so I’ve provided them in a Bitbucket snippet for easier reading and download.
Tip: Before beginning consider setting wp_debug to true in wp-config.php this will expose any errors or warnings encountered during your theme building process.
WordPress relies on style.css to provide basic information about your theme. Some fields are required while others are optional.
/*
Theme Name: Scratch JD
Theme URI: https://joseph-dickson.com/scratch-jd
Author: Joseph Dickson
Author URI: https://joseph-dickson.com
Description: Scratch is a no thrills theme.
Version: 1.0.0
License: GNU General Public License v3
License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
Text Domain: scratch-jd
*/
The Loop: Retrieves a post’s content from the WordPress database and displays it on the current post, page, index or archive.
the_title(): Retrieves a post’s title from the database and allows for adding html around it
the_content(): Retrieves the post’s content from the database
get_header(): Retrieves header.php from your theme.
get_footer(): Retrieves footer.php from your theme.
<?php
// Get the Header
get_header();
// The Loop
if ( have_posts() ) {
while ( have_posts() ) {
the_post();
// Display the post title and HTML
the_title();
// Display post content
the_content();
} // end while
} // end if
// Get the Footer
get_footer();
