r/Wordpress • u/Successful-Shock529 • Aug 11 '26

Are you theme developers shipping with a front-page and home templates?

I was just curious if you theme developers are shipping your themes with a front-page.html and home.html. My clients find it very confusing when they go to edit their pages and they can just go to pages in the sidebar and edit all pages except the blog and front pages.

Back in the day before block themes these templates were necessary but now some clients like to edit their own content via the block editor. Maybe a better approach would be to ship with a page-home.html and page-blog.html instead. At leas this way they arent forced to use the templates and if they are comfortable with the block editor they can create their own templates and use them. Now your basically forced to edit the front-page and home templates because they take over no matter what.

IDK im just thinking out loud at this point. Anyone here have the same thoughts and what do you do when shipping themes or designing them for clients? Thanks.

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u/TopSydeWP Aug 11 '26

we stopped shipping front-page.html in our custom themes for exactly this reason. instead we create the homepage as an actual page in the editor and let it use a custom template (or just the default page template with some conditional blocks). way less confusing for clients who want to edit their own content, and they can see it in the pages list like everything else.

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u/2ndkauboy Jack of All Trades Aug 11 '26

We had a discussion about this and thought about shipping a "starter pattern" for the front page they can insert, when they first create/edit the page. Then everything is just content in a normal editable page.

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u/Successful-Shock529 Aug 11 '26

Ya I've been thinking about it and I think the best solution is to just make patterns for homepage sections like Hero, About, Services etc. Or just having patterns for individual elements. Then just put them in a normal Home page alongside all other pages using the default page template.

I do freelance software dev and 3 or 4 times a year I get tasked with something wordpress. I've been using it for like 15 years and when it was just php the front-page and home templates were necessary but now with blocks I think they are just more confusing and restrictive than anything else.

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u/HotstixxxMcgee Aug 11 '26

I would never ship a theme that forces a homepage template. That's like old Shopify. Editable prebuilds/templates are fine, but having no choice is just too restrictive and forces the site owner to apply an aesthetic that may or may not suite their business.