WordPress is a great content management system but there are still times when you either just want to add a page to your website that is not a part of WordPress or when perhaps you just want to give make sure all the pages on your website whether they are in WordPress or not all have the same look and feel. Thankfully WordPress has made it easy to make WordPress functions available on other PHP pages.
I recently wanted to redo Free Favicon and make sure the blog and the website all had a new fresh look. I had a theme in mind for the blog and want to make sure the rest of the pages had the same theme and look.
The first step is to include the WordPress wp-load.php file. This is the key to using WordPress functions, like loading theme files, outside of WordPress. For Free Favicon I simply added the code to load the wp-load.php file in the header template that the site was already using by adding a line similar to the following:
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/path to your wordpress install/wp-load.php');
Once wp-load.php was included you can access all of the WordPress functions so I could call the header and footer functions from the theme and have the site themed using the same WordPress theme the blog was using.
//call the theme header get_header(); //call the theme footer get_footer();
The only problem I ran into after getting the pages themed with the WordPress theme was how to change the title of the PHP pages with the new header. The original PHP pages had a section at the top of each of them that defined the title for the page. I just ran the WordPress filter wp_title and assigned the defined page titles from the PHP pages to be displayed using the WordPress theme.
function assignpagetitle() {
global $documenttitle;
return $documenttitle;
}
add_filter('wp_title', 'assignpagetitle');
Overall it was a pretty painless upgrade to Free Favicon, and a very easy way to make sure the whole site had a consistent look and feel. There are still some pages I left without the new theme and eventually I will probably getting around to fixing them as well.
As the name suggests this is a responsive theme and it offers lots of choices for a website or blog to display your content. It is regularly updated and easy for users of all levels. This is often one of the first free responsive themes I suggest people take a look at. While the image makes it look like you need a custom home page you can set it up to not use the custom home page. The colors are also very easy to change and make the theme your own.
If you are looking for more of a magazine look then Max Magazine is a great responsive theme to take a look at. It has a beautiful jQuery slider, carousel posts, and can feature up to four categories on homepage. Certainly more suited to a business or news type site, although a personal site could easily use this theme as well.
If you are a photographer and want to show off your photos this is a great theme to do that with. Beautiful large images that you can set using featured images or insert images into posts. It is a nice clean theme that really helps show off your images. The amateur photographer clients I have worked with love it.
I was actually running this on my personal blog for a little while. Nice and clean, easy to read and works great no matter what device you are on. Probably best for a personal blog but could also be good for businesses. The options to have a full size page with no sidebar is great for showing off some larger photos as well.