The ‘page.php’ file displays your generic page content using this template. You could customise this page to make it look as you want and set it as the home page in the WordPress admin screen. But what happens if we want to create a contact form section? or maybe a one off page that contains some bespoke code? This is how you do it…

In your theme folder, create a new file. In this example, I’ll call it custom.php. Now insert the following code to it.

<?php
/*
Template Name: Custom Page Layout
*/
get_header(); ?>;

// enter your code here

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Now with that, create a new page in the admin section and on the right where it says “Attributes”, select the template name you wrote in the custom.php (Custom Page Layout in this case).

Easy

/*
Plugin Name: Fix Paging in Category Listings
Plugin URI: http://www.thinkbarefoot.com
Description: Fixes a bug where next/previous links are broken in category by year/month listings
Version: 0.5
Author: Doug Smith
Author URI: http://www.thinkbarefoot.com

Copyright 2007  Doug Smith  (email: dsmith@thinkbarefoot.com)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

*/

/**
 * Function to fix problem where next/previous buttons are broken on list
 * of posts in a category when the custom permalink string is:
 * /%category%/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
 * The problem is that with a url like this:
 *
 * /category/2007/10/page/2
 *
 * the 'page' looks like a post name, not the keyword "page"
 */
function remove_page_from_query_string($query_string)
{
    if ($query_string['name'] == 'page' && isset($query_string['page'])) {
        unset($query_string['name']);
        // 'page' in the query_string looks like '/2', so split it out
        list($delim, $page_index) = split('/', $query_string['page']);
        $query_string['paged'] = $page_index;
    }
    return $query_string;
}

add_filter('request', 'remove_page_from_query_string');

Happy days.