Homepage widgets

[lukefretwell]

Add widget section for homepage main content area.

See http://wp.govfresh.com as point of reference.

The way I initially set it up was as a page template (page-home.php) with the following elements:

• hero unit widget section
• icons
• show last 3 posts
• the_content
• homepage main widget section

[devinsays]

I added a home page template and updated the theme so that the home page hero and icon menu show based on the is_page_template('templates/home-page.php') conditional.

I also pulled the home page hero and icon menu code out of header.php (to make it more readable) and included it in a template partial (above-home-page.php). This potentially makes it more extendable and reusable.

I've been reluctant to implement this template fully because it is very proscriptive. I could see use cases where:

• The user would prefer to have four posts show at the top instead of three
• The user would prefer to have a message at the top, and then recent posts
• The user would prefer not to have recent posts, but still wants a widget area

I often get support requests for changing small items like this in themes I've made. On the other hand, being proscriptive makes for a quicker set up and a lot let options overhead. Difficult balance.

Let me think through this a bit more. I am considering a shortcode or meta fields to manage the number of items displayed and order.

Feedback or further thoughts welcome.

[lukefretwell]

Agree on comments. Perhaps being able to make it widgetable below the icons in the main area would suffice?

[devinsays]

This was updated as part of this commit: https://github.com/govfresh/govpress/commit/acf85849172acd5c84b09ad9c4befc564f6b9758