Update template home, front-page, and search template descriptions

[jameskoster]

Home

Before: "Displays as the site's home page, or as the Posts page when a static home page isn't set."
After: "Displays posts on the homepage, or on the Posts page if a static homepage is set.".

Fixed a couple of small typos and hopefully made the description a little clearer.

Front-page

Before: "Displays as the site's home page."
After: "Displays the homepage."

Reading settings use "homepage" rather than "home page". This is just a consistency tweak.

Search

Before: "Template used to display search results."
After: "Displays search results."

Similarly, this is a consistency adjustment. All other descriptions read "Displays..." rather than "Template used to display...".

[carolinan]

Should it be "Displays posts on the site's homepage, or on the Posts page if a static homepage is set.". ?
"site's"

[jameskoster]

Good Q :D Does it need "site" at all?

Displays posts on the homepage...

[carolinan]

Good Q :D Does it need "site" at all?

Displays posts on the homepage...

true...

[kjellr]

This is a decent improvement, though I do think the difference between "Home" and "Front Page" could be even more clear. I think we could merge this in as a quick improvement, but it might be a good idea to come up with a few other versions for those two, and then run them by users to see what they think those templates are for.

[jameskoster]

Agreed, those templates are quite problematic in the site editing / block theme paradigm.

It is confusing that:

1. A template called home does not necessarily resolve to display the homepage (depends on homepage settings).
2. You can have both front-page and home at the same time, and in that case it's not really clear what role each one plays since they have such similar names.
3. Both templates can be configured to make the homepage settings feel broken. Eg. set the homepage to display latest posts but do not include a Query in either template. Or vice versa!

On balance I'm not sure that front-page serves much of a purpose. To create a unique layout for a static homepage you can just create a $custom template and assign it to whichever page is set as the homepage. I would be in favor of not surfacing this template at all in the UI, unless the active theme includes it.

I still see use cases for the home template, though it might be best for its name to be dynamic based on the homepage settings. home makes sense when the homepage displays latest posts, but not when it displays a static page. But then you end up with a file name that conflicts with the name you see in the UI, which is probably a whole other can of worms.

[gingerling]

I agree the home page, home page (template) and front page (template) is very confusing, it's so confusing I actually find it hard to describe my issues (see #38345)

I suggest "home page" template needs to be strongly associated with where posts get displayed, and not to do with the home page of a site specifically.

It could be posts page or posts archive or just posts. Something like

Posts page
Template for where your latest posts display

[jameskoster]

Yep these are difficult to get right, and as we add more template-centric UI to the site editor we'll no doubt revisit them again :)

I think the home template is intrinsically linked to the confusing homepage settings in WordPress settings. Particularly the "Posts page" option that is enabled when a static homepage is set. This "page" does not behave like any other page:

1. It uses a different template (either home or index)
2. It's edit-ability is entirely reliant on the theme's rendition of those templates

We can probably do a better job of linking these concepts.

[gziolo]

It looks like these changes still need to be backported to WordPress core.

[gziolo]

Changes will get backported to WP core with WordPress/wordpress-develop#2534.