Cutline Theme for WordPress

Hi folks. The last update on the Cutline blog was ages ago, and I feel it’s time to keep things fresh, at least to the extent that we can. Recently, we have been receiving a handful of support inquiries on how to enable the “about” and “archives” pages that come linked on the Cutline header by default. Well, the answer here should be simple as explained in one of our earlier instruction posts, and it has even been expounded upon right here, just in case your permalink structure is a bit different from what how we would usually do it.

Simply put, Cutline’s navigation bar links to the Archives and About pages will work if you have static pages published with the page slug as /archives and /about, respectively.

This means that under the WordPress admin panel, you navigate down to Write — Page and then input the following:

For the archives page

1. Title: Archives (or whatever title you want the page to have)
2. Page slug: archives

And then click publish. The archives page should take care of itself. Cutline will automatically publish a page with your archives organized according to month and category (or tag, if your WP version supports it), as long as there is a page called “archives” and your permalink structure is set correctly.

For the about page

1. Title: About (or whatever title you want the page to have)
2. Page slug: about
3. Input your desired about text in the text field

And then hit publish. For the about page, you actually need to have something in the text field or else the about page will be blank (just the title).

If you have done these and still the About and Archive pages do not appear properly, then maybe you have a different permalink structure or setup. You can resolve this by either of the following means:

First, under Options — Permalinks you have to set your permalink structure to have the following parameter defined:

/%postname%/

So it could either be

/%category%/%postname%/

or even

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

or anything else, as long as the %postname% parameter is included. This ensures that WordPress calls the pages with slug “about” or “archives” when these are accessed via the header navigation links.

If you’re running WordPress using the default permalink structure, you can edit the header.php file such that you change the links to /about and /archives. Simply look for these lines:

<li><a <?php if (is_page('about')) echo('class="current" '); ?>href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/about/">about</a></li>

and replace the part that says is_page('about') with is_page(##), where ## is the page ID of your About page.

And also replace the part that says <?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/about/">about</a> with <?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/?p=##">about</a> where ## is the page ID of your About page.

Note that page IDs can be found under Manage — Pages.

Same with the Archives page. Simply look for the line that says

<li><a <?php if (is_archive() || is_page('archives')) echo('class="current" '); ?>href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/archives/">archives</a></li>

and replace is_page('archives') with is_page(##), and also href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/archives/">archives with href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/?p=##">archives

where ## is the page ID for your Archives page.

If these still don’t work, then perhaps the problem lies elsewhere. Drop us a line and let us help you out.

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