- The Kiwi Tree - The backbone of Kiwi, the directory tree
- The Peel - The files that control the look and feel of your Kiwi theme
Have a taste
So what files do what in Kiwi? Which ones can you play with and not really worry about completely hosing your theme. Where do you look to make a change not found in the Kiwi modification page?
These are files that are included in the most recent release of Kiwi for Wordpress 2.0. Hopefully this can give you a good foundation for modifying Kiwi to do hat you want, if not just visit the N1L forums, where all of us Kiwi-lovin’ folks hang out and support this great theme. If you’re looking to change your style a bit, you can check out my Kiwi Style page for some new CSS files for your theme.
A Note About Pages vs. Posts
Kiwi comes with a number of templates to be used in the creation of static pages. The theme also includes references to several of these static pages in the default layout configuration, and unless you’ve changed your Kiwi configuration or created theme pages, then you may wind up getting “404 - Page not found” errors.
To create those pages, go into your Wordpress as though you were going to make a post, and in the navigation bar at the top of your posting page you’ll have the option to “Write Page”. Select that, and enter whatever you want the content of your page to be in the posting area, then select the appropriate template for your page from the list under “Page Template” There should be some that say “Archives”, “Topics”, “Authors Single”, etc. If you don’t choose a template, nothing bad will happen. Just be sure that you set the post slug to whatever the link is looking for - ie. if the page is /about/ set the slug to “about”.
The Kiwi Tree
When properly uploaded into your themes folder, you should have 7 subdirectories and 24 files. The subdirectories can be divided into two types: theme-related and plugin-related. We’ll get back to the files later, for now I’ll concentrate on the folders you need to have.
/code
Contents: 6 files
Purpose: These are javascript files that are used mainly for AJAX functions not yet implimented in Kiwi. However, because they are linked to the actual theme, you don’t want to mess with these.
/css
Contents: 1 file
Purpose: contains an additional stylesheet geared towards forcing Internet Explorer to load Kiwi the way it was designed to be loaded.
/featurepics
Contents: 1 image
Purpose: Formerly located in /plugins/kiwi, but moved when WP2.0 was released and allowed theme-specific plugins to be included under /themes. This directory holds the 100×100 images used with The Feature plugin.
/images
Contents: 2 subdirectories, 19 files
Purpose: Holds all the default images used with Kiwi - background, RSS icons, and assorted header images.
/includes
Contents: 9 files, 2 subdirectories
Purpose: This is the very core of Kiwi. It’s not recommended that you tinker with anything in here unless you have made changes to how the theme functions (such as installing it under a directory other than /themes/kiwi) and know what you’re doing.
/kiwi-images
Contents: 6 files
Purpose: Contains images used in the Kiwi options page
/metapics
Contents: 1 file
Purpose: Formerly located in /plugins/kiwi, but moved when WP2.0 was released and allowed theme-specific plugins to be included under /themes. This directory holds the header images used with the Metapic plugin.
The Outer Peel
The actual Kiwi theme is made up of 24 files all located within the /themes/kiwi directory. These files control the look and feel of Kiwi, and most of your modifications would be made here.
/404.php
Used when making a custom 404 error page that fits with your Kiwi theme
archives.php
Used to display a page with your blog’s archives
authorPage.php
If your blog has mutiple authors and you want each one to have his/her own “about me” page, you would use this as the template when writing the page.
authors.php
If your blog uses multiple authors and you want to have a generic “overview” page that shows each one, this is the template to use when writing that page.
comments.php
Lists the current comments and displays the comment form. If you have the Gravitar plugin activated, it will also add each commentors Gravitar to their comment.
elsewhere.php
Used to display your Wordpress links or the RSS feed of your choice on both the blog index and the single posts and pages.
firstPost.php
The is the first post’s excerpt displayed at the top of your blog index page, taking up two columns and located directly under the header image. This file contains the code that changes the display of the post based on whether you want Kiwi to put the excerpt in the header’s frame, or just below the frame.
footer.php
The Kiwi footer, displayed only if you have enabled it in the theme’s settings.
functions.php
Links all the Kiwi plugins to the theme and handles options page.
header.php
The theme’s header, containing all the typical things found in a page’s <head>
index.php
Loads up all of the main parts of the theme - header, loop, and footer
kiwi.php
Similar to functions.php, but also sets the default theme options
links.php
Individual page that shows your collection of links from Del.icio.us. Used when writing a Page
listPost.php
Lists the most posts in the “Recent Posts” column
noposts.php
The page that is displayed if there aren’t any posts that match your criteria (searching, nothing for a particular archive day, etc)
page.php
The default template used when writing a static page.
searchform.php
Just a simple search form used throughout the theme.
sidebar.php
The menu on the right, contains all the code used to display your sidebar based on your Kiwi settings.
single.php
Template for the page used with individual posts
style.css
A major part of your theme, this file controls how everything is displayed: background images, colors, links, borders, everything.
subPost.php
Controls how the two columns of posts below the first post are displayed.
topics.php
If you would like a static page listing all the information on the categories you’ve used on your blog, this is the template to use.
