Static Front Page problem

Question

My theme uses the front-page.php file to display a number of items on the front page including a slideshow and some featured items. I have also designed it so the static front page as set in the wordpress settings is displayed as an excerpt within this template. I then planned on having a read more button so the full page could be viewed on it's own without the slideshow etc( i presumed using page.php ) but it appears I've outsmarted myself, as that static page seems to be destined to display using front-page.php according to the WP hierarchy. Can anyone suggest anything that might help me. What i need is some way to tell that page to open in page.php if it's accessed via the read more button.

Answer 1

I would recommend having two static Pages for this arrangement:

1. The static page to serve as the Placeholder for your site front page
2. The static page to hold the content you want to display as an excerpt on the front page

Then, in front-page.php, you simply query static page 2 above, and output post-excerpt and a permalink. Once the permalink is clicked, the content from static page 2 is then rendered as per normal, via page.php.

(If this is a distributed Theme, then you'll want to add a Theme option or other means by which to select the Page ID to query in front-page.php; otherwise, you can just make the ID static, hard-coded in the template file.)

Answer 2

Not sure if there's a better answer but in case it's of help to someone in future, I ended up adjusting the query using query_posts( 'page_id=' . $front_page_article_id); where $front_page_article_id was a new theme option I set up.