Sciencetext Tips & Tricks

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Static WordPress

October 17th, 2008 · by David Bradley >> 4 Comments

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Wordpress logoIt is a bit of a dilemma static or blog as the front-page? Kim Woodbridge recognized the issue early on, and discusses the details of how to handle a static front page on your blog. For me, Sciencetext is straightforward, it’s a blog and the blog front page displays excerpts from the most recent posts and that’s it. Sciencebase, on the other hand, was a bit of a problem.

Sciencebase is a hybrid, it began more as a science portal having evolved from my proto-websites dating back to 1996. It’s therefore got stacks of legacy content, tools and other gubbins. Once I went WordPress with it, the choice of whether to have a static or blog homepage was kind of made for me – the front page had to be a hybrid too.

But, it has literally hundreds of legacy pages built up through the late 1990s and into the noughties. These all lay outside the blog heirarchy and so it was a bit more involved than simply installing WordPress and hitting go, to make it all work properly.

Once I had actually figured out how to make a web page (not a WordPress Page, with a capital P) work outside the WordPress folder, but be themed and operate with WordPress features, I wrote an explanatory post. It’s relatively painless but very powerful. Any page can be made to behave like a themed WordPress Page and pages you don’t want within that framework can stay as they are outside of it and follow their own rules.

One thing that I have not yet achieved is to enable comments on these extra-WP pages (little p). No amount of hacking and tweaking seems to work. Static Pages (big P) in WordPress, no problem, but not the themed little p pages. Anyone with an answer to that riddle should leave a comment. I’d be very grateful for a solution.

4 responses so far ↓

  • Kim Woodbridge // Oct 17, 2008 at 4:12 pm

    Hi David,

    The other article on making static html pages work with WordPress is really interesting and helpful. I had no idea this could be done.

    I mentioned this in my comment to you on my site but I’ve been wondering on the best way to convert an old .shtml site to WordPress. I don’t want the links to break so I wasn’t sure if would be best to use redirects to the new pages in WordPress or to try to use the .shtml extensions in WordPress – I think redirects make more sense.

    The site is 12 years old and gets quite a bit of traffic even though I have neglected it for 6 years. I thought I should put some work into it and revitalize it.

  • David Bradley // Oct 17, 2008 at 5:40 pm

    For anyone else interested in this (Kim and I have corresponded off-piste as it were). The answer lies in tweaking your .htaccess file so that files with other extensions are parsed by your server as PHP.

  • Sven // Dec 22, 2008 at 11:58 pm

    Great :-)

    I was looking for the same (comments in static pages), would you like to share the “complete” solution?

    Thanks

  • David Bradley // Dec 23, 2008 at 9:23 am

    I am yet to discover how to enable comments on this type was static page…anyone know how to do it?


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