Add Single.php File to this Wordpress Theme

By Josh | November 14, 2007

Update: I’m no longer using the theme mentioned in this post. I’m sure that the method mentioned here will still work.

When I Installed this theme a couple months back, I had no idea that it didn’t have a single.php file, and I really didn’t think that it was going to be that annoying when I figured it out. Well, I found out that it can be quite annoying when trying to add things to your page that you only want appearing on the post’s page and not the home page. One example is, when I tried to put a Digg button on a post, it showed up on the home page also, and that isn’t good because it showed no Diggs for my home page, while the post had Diggs of its own.

Well, I searched Google, etc., but I couldn’t find a solution to my problem. It looked like I needed to have a really good knowledge of PHP in order to create my own php file for this theme. I would some day like to create my own theme for this blog, but I don’t have the time right now to learn another language, especially since I am in the process of learning Java right now, writing big papers, taking tests, and bla bla bla.

I happened to accidentally come across the solution. I love it when you don’t know what you are doing, but it works anyways. I copied my index.php file and renamed the copy into single.php. I at first thought that this didn’t do anything. It was about a month ago when I tried this out. It didn’t seem to work, so I just left the file on there and never fooled with it again. Then, tonight I got back on my blog and noticed that the single pages weren’t showing up the same as my index page. I recently made some changes to my index page, and was wondering why the single pages hadn’t updated yet. I was thinking that maybe my server was just being slow like it has been sometimes, but I also noticed it yesterday, so it couldn’t be that my server was that slow. So I opened up my single.php file and changed the code in there to see if it made any difference. Guess what? It did! I now have a single.php file that I can edit without changing the look of my index.php file.

I was about to give up on this, and maybe even go as far as change to another theme. I really like this theme and didn’t want to change just yet. If you are using this theme, then do what I did to get a single.php file. You may have to wait for a little while for it to work. I’m not really sure why, but sometimes it takes a little while for new files to register on my website. If you are looking how to enable widgets on this theme, then you can read my post on that also.

Let me know if it does/doesn’t work for you, or if you have any questions.