It’s easy to fix it. When “function.php” code has been modified occurs some problems whith extra-spaces between the code lines. Just delete that spaces and the Admin will save it as normal.

The use that springs to mind is the scenario I’m trying to implement at the moment- I have a particular category of posts that use custom fields, so I need to have custom templates for displaying the additional meta information for just these particular posts and the archive pages for these posts. Wordpress already seems to have the functionality for custom category templates, but I need to do the same thing at the single-post level, too.

I want to take things up one level, though, and use different templates for a single post depending on the URL (based on category).

Let’s say the default for each post is: /post/foo.html
And I want to use a different template for the private version, which is: /post/private/foo.html

(It serves up different content using different custom fields.)

I can use redirect rules to control access to the private version. The trouble is, each post exists in _both_ categories, so it will always use one or the other as the template. I want to use /private/ only when someone goes to that specific URL. Under this current setup, Wordpress is serving up every /post/foo.html using the private template because it also happens to be in the private category.

Can I fix this with changes to the functions.php file?

In any case, thanks for all your help.

I’m wondering what I did wrong. Have you had anyone else report this problem? Looks like I will be doing some reading on the functions file.

And I’m not a coder, but I was able to follow your step-by-step directions and get it working a just a few minutes. I found some other instructions elsewhere that seemed like they might be what I need, (http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development#Query-based_Templates), but they did not spell out exactly where to paste the code. I’m sure a lot of people here didn’t need every bit of detail, but I did, so thanks for writing it all out.

Thanks so much for helping me out!