Want to style frames around content and widget areas

[FoxdenVixen]

I am looking at all the php pages that go into a WP theme. It can be overwhelming even for a seasoned web designer. My goal is to add decorative framing around all content areas on the home page (using 3 column php page with left and right sidebar, other pages will have left sidebar, and still others will be fullwidth. Exactly which pages from the parent should I copy over to the child to add the frame divs? I have already copied over the header php page and added the top frame to it.

[FoxdenVixen]

Nevermind, I figured out which pages I needed to use for the child theme. I copied front-page.php, and page-fullwidth.php for now. I will have to figure out what other pages need to be copied over as I get more in depth with adding content.

[Alyssa]

Cool, I’ll leave this open just in case 😉

[FoxdenVixen]

Thank you. I have added ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) plugin and am running into problems. For example, on the About page, I want

About Us
About the Game
Our Team

I set up the custom fields but need to add PHP code to content-page.php in order for the custom fields to show up. Well I am using different layouts for different pages but it seems that content-page.php is used throughout the site so my styling is all messed up. Do I need to create custom PHP template pages? For instance about-content-page.php that will pull in only what I set up for the custom fields for the About section? Hope that makes sense. And if I need to do this, I think I should add the styling (the divs for the frames, not the CSS code) to each template page I create instead of using frame-top.png on the header, and then frame-middle and frame-bottom on the content page. That way each individual page has the frame styling I am going for. Am I thinking correctly?

[Alyssa]

@foxdenvixen if you need to add PHP to individual pages then I would absolutely recommend adding individual page templates and as you said calling the custom content-page.php this would be the most effective way of doing this and easiest to change around and test with…just change the page template 🙂 You are definitely on the right track, your previous message was a bit vague so I though it was not so much a theme question, sorry about that.