When scanning through the themes available on wordpress I decided upon the Chunk theme for its simplicity and clean look.
One of the default settings for this theme is it has infinite scroll. In other words, every entry ever made on this blog will be listed on this single page. You won’t have to go to a “next page.” I’m not a big fan of this, but I can’t change it.
The downside of this layout is the Search field and a list of the Archives for the blog are listed at the bottom of this infinite scroll. So, unless you scroll ALL THE WAY to the bottom, you don’t even know those options are available, as seen below.
I didn’t like that, so I figured out a way to add them to the top of the blog.
Remembering back to my html days, I knew there used to be a way to link to a location within a page. This was done in the code by tagging a section of the page with an ID. You could then create a link that will go directly to that section of the page by putting in the web address, then # sign plus the tag ID. (i.e., joeswebpage.com#tagid).
Sound confusing? I hope not.
So, the first thing I had to do was find out if there were any ID tags in the code on this page that I could use to direct people to the Search and Archives section directly. I scrolled down to the bottom of the page to the area I wanted people to go to and looked at the code (depending on the browser and OS you can right click and select Inspect Element or View Code or something like that).
In the picture below, you can see that as I move the cursor over different parts of the code at the bottom, it highlights what that code is referring to on the page above it (the orange and green section). This orange and green section moved from one part of the page to another as I moved the cursor down the code one line at a time.
Up close, the highlighted section above the Search field looked like this.
And found that the name of the field was called widgets.
I made a note of that and repeated the process until I found the segment that encompasses Archives.
And found that it is called archives-2.
So now I know that the section above the Search field is called widgets and the Archives area is called archives-2.
Now I had to add it to the Menu at the top of the blog.
- I went into the dashboard and opened the Menu option in wordpress.
- Next, I chose to add a link.
- I created the Search link by using the following address, petebauerblog.wordpress.com#widgets
- I created an Archives link by using petebauerblog.wordpress.com#archive-2 (see below).
By doing this, I know have important links at the top of the blog. Even though these links are not available in the theme, with the infinite scroll default, I felt they were desperately needed.
If you have a similar theme with similar limitations, you should be able to use the same process to create links within the home page too.
Good luck.