Removing Thesis Page Titles With Filters

I see a lot of repeated questions on the best way to hide Page Titles in Thesis, so I guess it must be a pretty common issue.

While there are a bunch of ways to do it which either require hacking PHP code (which is prone to breaking something) or hiding it in CSS (which may impact your search rankings) I have never been fully satisfied with them. But, as usual, there is a better way–using Thesis Filters.

Note: I have written about this before here, but I was never satisfied with the methods proposed. So for a better way, read on.

What is a WordPress filter?

You can read all about Thesis Filters here and access the library of functions which allow you access the code to do other fabulous tricks to amuse your family.

Given the number of available places to apply filters, often the trick can be finding the right one for the job. Fortunately, there is very specific area which gives us direct laser-targeted precision directly to the headline area of any post or page.

The Problem

By default, any post or page will display a section entitled Headline Area. The HTML looks like this:

<div class="headline_area">
  <h1 class="entry-title">The Title</h1>
  <p class="headline_meta"><abbr title="2010-11-12" class="published">November 12</abbr></p>
</div>

But what if we won’t want a title displayed on our Pages as is often the case when you are building non-blog site. There isn’t any good way at the Page-level to remove titles.

The Solution

What we want to do is remove the whole section starting with the outer div. We also want this removed before it is even served up to your HTML page, so this is where custom filters come in handy. The next step is to write our own filter to process and remove the section.

Here are 3 working examples which apply a filter to the thesis_show_headline_area function. You can cut and paste these into your custom_funtion.php file as-is and they will work fine. Just pick one

Code Examples

How to Use This Code

Warning and Disclaimer: There is some PHP coding required, but it’s pretty easy to do. But it’s also easy to miss a closing bracket and cause your site to go dark. If you break your site, I am not responsible for the damage. You’ve been warned. (FTP is your friend in case of emergency.) When in doubt, Read the Friendly Manual or visit the Thesis Forums.

Go to your Thesis Custom File editor menu, select the custom_function.php from the list and select the Edit Selected File button to display your custom_function file.

If you’ve never made changes to this file, you can go to the very bottom of the file and copy & paste in one of the following code blocks.

Version 1 – Hide all page titles

As the name implies, this will hide it on any page on your site, but not on single post pages or the home page.

function suppress_title() {
  return (is_page()) ? false : true;
}
add_filter('thesis_show_headline_area', 'suppress_title');

Version 2 – Hide a single page title by Page ID

Want to know how to find the Page ID in WordPress?

This allows you to specify a page by its ID. Useful if you only want to hide on a single page.

function suppress_title() {
  return (is_page('32')) ? false : true;
}
    add_filter('thesis_show_headline_area', 'suppress_title');

Version 3, hide multiple pages specified by title and/or Post ID

Want to know how to find the Page ID in WordPress?

Lastly, you can specify an array of Page IDs, Page Titles or Page Slugs. Pretty fancy huh? You can specify any number of additional pages by appending values to the array.

  function suppress_title() {
  return (is_page(array('35','Contact','Directions','all-about-me-page'))) ? false : true;
}
add_filter('thesis_show_headline_area', 'suppress_title');

What The Code Does

Each time WordPress builds the page to display, it checks to see if it’s of type Page, if it is then it just removes the headline area from the code. This way no CSS tricks are needed and we can just forget about this on our single pages. Nice, eh?

If you get stuck, here is the WordPress codex information on using the WordPress is_page function.

Good luck!

If you have found any other good uses for filters, leave a comment.

Image Credit via Flickr