One day while at work I was talking to one of the girls and brought up the fact that I love to mess around with WordPress. She was delighted to hear that because she was starting a personal blog for her child’s milestones.

She was on the lookout for a good theme for her newly created site. I told her that I was willing and happy to recommend some sites that offer some free ones as well as some that have premium themes. Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of paying in general so of course I was a little hesitant to name off a few but you are not just paying for the theme you are also paying for their support.

Recently on Twitter I’ve seen a lot of discussion about GPL. I do like it. I, unfortunately, haven’t read all of it. I have skimmed through some of the parts and I agree with what many of the people have to say about it but I am getting a little sidetracked. Although this does slightly pertain to what I have on my mind: themes. I know shocker, right?

I have messed with how WordPress handles some code and seeing how to create not only a useful theme but good ones as well. Since being able to assign myself tickets on Trac-WordPress Theme Review Team- I have been able to see how many other developers and theme-connoisseurs code their themes. This has given me plenty of ideas for my themes as well. Being able to test with somebody else’s code has been a great learning experience for me and has given me more confidence in applying for a job @Automattic as a theme developer/wrangler.

Yes, there are things that I still don’t feel as strong about but I am more than capable of finding the answer.

With that being said the current theme I am actually creating is for a baby milestone blog. What I am implementing is a custom post type called “milestones” which was a slight pain to get working at first. I finally managed to get the index page to work the way I intended since I was calling the wrong function to begin with.

What I was trying to use was

new wp_Query()

and not hooking to it to add the custom post type to the main query. In order to hook to the main query you have to use the hook:

add_action ( 'pre_get_posts' , 'add_custom_post_type_to_main', 9, 1 );
// Create the callback function
function add_custom_post_type_to_main( $query ) {
    if ( is_home() && $query->is_main_query() )
        $query->set( 'post_type',array( 'post', 'milestones' ) );
    return $query;
} 

in order for it to work properly. What it actually does it create the default

$query

and adds to it the newly created custom post type from the array of post_type.

The error I kept getting was a 404, meaning that there were no results being found when I would try to see more posts through the next_posts_link() and it kept giving me a minor headache. After some searching and reading I finally found the function I needed and now all is well. Next stage is getting all the images and the final look of the site down.