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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T19:42:31+00:00

I’m putting together a web site that needed to include some signup and blogging

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I’m putting together a web site that needed to include some signup and blogging capability. WordPress seems to be a perfect fit for that portion of the app, so I’ve started experimenting with it. I see plenty of tutorials on creating custom themes so I don’t expect that to be a problem.

What I’m not able to figure out is what to do with the rest of my site. I will have other non-blogging related php pages that will access a database, etc. I see that wordpress has a capability for generic pages of static content, but these would need to be coded PHP pages. I just can’t find a way of having the wordpress theme apply to other php pages outside of wordpress. I was hoping of just doing something like

wp_header();
blah blah
wp_sidebar();
blah blah
wp_footer();

but I’m not really seeing any examples or documentation on how this might be done. Am I missing a key piece of documentation?

EDIT: The answer is to essentially copy and paste a file from the theme, with one crucial addition:

require( dirname(__FILE__) . 'path_to_wp_root/wp-load.php');

That sets up the wordpress environment and allows me to call get_header(), get_sidebar(), get_footer(), etc.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Generally, “yes”.

    A well-designed WordPress theme uses mostly CSS/Stylesheets for display, and you are correct in your assumptions: Look through the “Codex” about Theme Design / Template Design (http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates).

    Essentially you could base your design on some of the current theme files, but leave out “the loop”.

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