Dumb Questions Ahead:
- If
index.php
andarchive.php
are practically the same thing, what’s the point of havingarchive.php
? - When should I ever want to use
archive.php
overindex.php
? - If I use front-page and Blog, it doesn’t switch to
archive.php
which you might expect to and then useindex.php
in the place offront-page.php
.
1 Answer
index.php
and archive.php
might be the same but don’t have to be the same. index.php
will display your blog post archive and in the absence of archive.php
(or other more specific archive files) it will display your date, author, etc. archives as well. But it doesn’t have to.
You can, if you want, display your archived differently that your main blog index. That is the point of those specialized files– they allow you to alter the look of specific pages without having to write complicated conditionals into the index.php
file.
The difference between the two files is what you make of it. That difference can be a lot or none.
Reference
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy