Changing what the home page displays

- As I explained in the very beginning of this course, many people still think of WordPress primarily as a blogging platform. I think this is in part due to the fact that when you setup a new WordPress site like we've done in this course, the front page automatically displays the most recent post which are typically understood as the blog. But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, for most of the sites I've built for clients, the blog is just a small part of the overall site and it's relegated to its own Menu item. The front page is a custom page with specific content designed just for that page.

So how do we go about changing what the front page displays. Well, if you've been paying close attention, you would have noticed that the last option in the Customizer is called Static Front Page and that's where we need to go now. If you open the Static Front Page option, you'll see in WordPress, you can choose what displays on your front page. Either your latest post or the blog or a static page. Now, if you choose to display a static page, you have to select what page you want to display as the front page and also what page you want to display as the posts page, so that is the blog.

Now in between the movies, I've already created my front page. It's just a standard page with a featured image and some welcome text. I might expand this later but for now it'll work just fine. But to make this work, I also have to add an additional page. So I have to go back to my Customizer here and close it. Then I have to create a new page. I'm going to call this page, News cause that's what I want to call the blog on my site. I'm not actually going to add any content to this page because the content will be replaced with the reverse chronological blog index.

So I'm just going to publish this page. Now I have both the News page and the Welcome to H+ Sport page. That means I can go back to the front end, go to Customize, Static Front Page, change to A static page and then select Welcome to H+ Sport as the front page and News as the posts page. So now, if I click on Home here on the Preview, you'll see I'm taken to this static front page and if I had a Menu button that was pointing at the News page, I'll be able to go to the News page too, but I don't.

So now that I've changed what the front page displays, I also have to change my Main Menu. So I'll go back to the Menus section in the Customizer, go to Main Menu, click Add Items and because the News page is a page, I can go under Pages and find it, there it is. Then I'll drag News up here directly under Home. It appears over here in the Preview. I can click on it, takes me to the index where I see all my blog posts and then I can just click Save & Publish.

So by using this static front page function, I can now control what happens on the front page on my site and this can be further extended, if your theme has a custom page template for the front page or you use a plugin that extends the front page with more functionality.