How to Remove the Genesis Page Templates

Genesis comes preloaded with two page templates. The Blog page template allows you to display your posts using a custom loop. See this post on why I don’t recommend you use it.

The Archive page template provides links to your pages, posts, authors, categories, and month archives. I don’t really like this page either because it displays information I don’t care about (authors, month archives) and doesn’t display information I do (any custom post types I’ve built). If I want something similar to this, I create a standard page and use Column Classes and Display Posts Shortcode to list whatever content I like. See my Tutorials section as an example.

Even though I don’t want these templates, I’ve been stuck with them since they’re in Genesis. When a client asks “When should I use this Blog page template?” I’d have to explain why not to use it. If there are features of WordPress or Genesis I don’t want my client to use, I like to remove them so there’s no confusion.

Thanks to this ticket committed in WordPress 3.9, I can now remove the page templates I don’t want in Genesis using this in my child theme’s functions.php file:

<?php
/**
* Remove Genesis Page Templates
*
* @author Bill Erickson
* @link http://www.billerickson.net/remove-genesis-page-templates
*
* @param array $page_templates
* @return array
*/
function be_remove_genesis_page_templates( $page_templates ) {
unset( $page_templates['page_archive.php'] );
unset( $page_templates['page_blog.php'] );
return $page_templates;
}
add_filter( 'theme_page_templates', 'be_remove_genesis_page_templates' );
view raw functions.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Bill Erickson

Bill Erickson is the co-founder and lead developer at CultivateWP, a WordPress agency focusing on high performance sites for web publishers.

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Comments

  1. Viktor says

    Super great tutorial, thanks!

    I really prefer only seeing what I and my clients need to see.

    :o)

  2. Dale says

    Hi Bill,

    Hope you well and safe.

    Can you please enlighten me if this is still applicable in Genesis V3.3.2. and would you recommend I use this snippet on a Genesis/WooCommerce site that does not use post/blog.

    Also how would unsetting the page_archive.php affect WooCommerce and it’s product pages?

    Would love to know.

    Kind regards,
    Dale

    • Bill Erickson says

      This is no longer necessary. The archive and blog page templates were removed in Genesis 3.0 (changelog).

      Unsetting the page_archive.php file should not affect WooCommerce in any way. It’s a custom page template that is not used by WooCommerce.