As we saw in the template hierarchy video,

the index.php serves as the default backup for all other templates.

So, if you do not have other templates set up,

they will default to using the index.php template.

For this reason, you'll usually want to keep the index.php file fairly generic,

unless you're building out all of the other templates as well.

To briefly review, if we take a look again at the template hierarchy,

we could see that we have custom options along the left.

They get more general and

finally end with the index.php as the fallback for all other templates.

If we come in to the code for our theme and

opened up the index.php file, we can see that it's pretty simple.

We have a call to the get header and

footer, which we'll look at more in a minute.

But it should be pretty obvious that that's calling in the header and

the footer files.

We have a bunch of html markup.

Then we have the loop, starting with our if and while statement.

The content that displays for each post or page, the title, and

the content, and then we close out our loop.

We then pull in the sidebar and close out the rest of our markup.

This is a good example of a common generic index.php file.

Because we don't know potentially what page on the site this will be used for,

we have something very generic that's basically just the title and the content.

One thing we could do though here, is instead of just ending the if statement,

we can add an else statement that would then allow us to

put a backup message in case there was no content to display.

For example, we could copy this above.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Now, what this would do,

is if there's no content, it would give them a message explaining what's going on.

While this may or may not be the best message possible,

it is an example of how you can begin to customize and make this template more

flexible by providing feedback if the content we're looking for is not there.