Serve Archive Template from the Plugin

In this episode, you and I are going to write the code that tells WordPress to load our archive template. Remember, out-of-the-box, WordPress doesn’t look in the plugins for templates; rather, it only searches the theme. Right? I showed that to you in the last episode. Therefore, we have to write the code that tells WordPress to load our file.

Let’s dive into WordPress Core and look at how WordPress looks up and finds the template to load. We’re searching for a filter hook to use. You’ll look at get_archive_template() which is in wp-includes/template.php.

Then you’ll build a helpers file and a load_the_faq_archive_template() callback function. In this function, you’ll see what value WordPress sends, which is the full qualified path to the archive file if it found it. If it doesn’t exist, then it gives us an empty string.

We’ll talk about qualifying the archive to make sure this is for the FAQ post type.