The built-in WordPress theme has a lot of redundancy in the various
entry-viewing templates (index.php, archives.php, category.php,
search.php). Because I dislike repetition and don’t want to worry about
whether I’ve kept the markup in sync across multiple files, I ended up with
the following approach.
Each of the noted files is reset to the following code:
<?php get_header() ?>
<div id='content'>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php include('_post.php') ?>
<?php endwhile; else : ?>
<?php include('_no_post.php') ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
<ol id='nextprev'>
<li id='previous'><?php next_posts_link('Previous Posts') ?></li>
<li id='next'><?php previous_posts_link('Next Posts') ?></li>
</ol>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
_post.php contains whatever markup I’ve chosen for my posts and is
a great way to do self-contained hAtom hentry classes.
_no_post.php contains a ‘sorry, bub!’ kind of message.
Of course, the templates don’t always need to have exactly the same code — for example, in the search template you may want to indicate the page is different from the standard view.
…
<div id='content'>
<div id='search_note'>Search results for ‘<?php searchbox_text() ?>’</div>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
…
