Every new user of cutline’s word press theme wants to know how to add the navigation tabs at the top for ‘About’ ‘Archives’ and ‘Sitemap’ pages. This may occur for other themes also, but I haven’t checked as I use cutline. The Cutline forum seems a bit slow in answering this question AND the answer is difficult to find.

So how do we do it?

1. Go to Write>Write page. For the About page write up something about you. Also on the right hand column you should see Post Slug. ‘About’ should already appear there as it is all in the theme. Publish this post.

2. Do the same for Archives, but you won’t need to write anything there as the archives will come up automatically.

3. Do the same for Sitemap except you won’t need to write anything there either. The sitemap will occur without you doing anything.

4. I also like to have Contact at the top of my blog in the navigation. For this you will need a Contact plugin which you will activate, but you will have to make a page called Contact too.

Now your Archives and About pages should be appearing at the top automatically because cutline has that added into its theme.

What about Sitemap and Contact?

You will have to change the PHP. Do not panic! Go to Presentation>Theme Editor and look for the file called Header. This is the php file where I found the navigation links.

It will say, down the bottom, If this file were writable you could edit it.

So we have to make that file writable. Go to your FTP software. Look at the right hand side of your FTP as these are the host server files. Find this file (header.php) under wp_content/themes and right click on it. To make it writable you simply click on every box.

Go back to your dashboard on word press. Go to Presentation>Theme editor> find header.php again. At the bottom you should now see “Update”

Go back to image I have shown you. You will see a list there of what is in your navigation tabs. Copy that code identically or copy and paste, and change the code to reflect that it is Sitemap and Contact. ‘About’ and ‘Archives’ should already be there.

Update the file. Bingo!

I still have to learn how to add any more tabs in the navigation, but at least I am freed up in terms of being able to change things on any of the php files. I have added my feedburner code to the main template. To be honest I don’t know if this is what produced the links like email this at the bottom of each post or not or whether that occured because I signed up for Feed Flare at the same time.