Creating Category Pages
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I’m working on a full-scale website that was professionally designed in WordPress. We already use Posts for various categories, such as press releases and news items, but don’t yet have an organizational blog integrated into our website. I would like to do this by creating a “Blog” page, which would be accessible from the top mini navigation menu and would display Posts in a category labeled “Blog Posts.”
However, I need to know how to create a Category Page–from what I’ve searched in the WordPress support site, I cannot seem to find instructions on how to set up a certain category of posts to show up on a designated page.
Can anyone help me? My web programming experience is minimal.
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Regarding Category Pages: brittaniemurch is right: There is no online support for people who need “instructions on how to set up a certain category of posts to show up on a designated page.” I have wasted hours on this issue. Why should we bother purchasing Premium themes with a robust navigation menu when we can’t link posts to them? It’s MUCH less frustrating for us just to copy the url links to the posts and paste them on the appropriate menu pages. But this doesn’t look professional and it’s not why bloggers purchase Premium themes. Yes, I have a WP.com blog.
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@chambersinhawaii50, why did you not come here and ask? That is what these forums are for.
Your theme, if you are talking about this blog, http://cechambers.wordpress.com/ , supports custom menu. Create a custom menu and add the categories to it. All themes here with top navigation support custom menus in that location and all themes without top navigation support custom menus through the the custom menu widget.
With custom menus, you can add categories, tags, even posts, pages, and you can even create custom links for whatever you want. You can even set up things so that you have submenus (dropdowns) and I think it supports up to 4 total levels. They are incredibly flexible.
As far as premium themes go, they have to use the custom menu feature as well if you want anything other than pages to show up in the top navigation, just like the free themes.
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Please, don’t be shy about asking for things you cannot find or figure out. We have some incredibly good volunteers here with tons of experience with wordpress.com, and staff is there to help as well (although they are right now off on a brainstorming and coding blitz to bring us all new features).
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Thanks. I figured out the problem. After I posted my comment, I went back once again and read the instructions in Custom Menus. Do you mind me suggesting that the instructions be rewritten for novices and explained step-by-step? The Custom Menus page has a link to the Categories support page but neither really explain how important it is that a blogger should first create categories in all posts to correspond with the navigation menu labels.
The categories will then be listed in the Pages box and also in the Category box in the Dashboard Menu. However, frustrating problems will arise if bloggers, following the first set of steps in the Custom Menus support page, create Pages rather than Category pages.
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Yeah, the custom menu support page could use some tweaking. Everything is always a work in progress.
One other thing I’ll mention is that the categories links in the top menu may return 404 not found errors if you have not yet published any posts in that category. The 404 error is because there are no posts for wordpress to display.
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To thesacredpath: May I express my frustration with WP re. the lack of support for the Traction theme? I didn’t want to share online that I think WP technicians often seem to be woefully lacking in experience with this design, but this has been my overall experience. I’ve received very bad advice from very pleasant technicians via the forum and also via email support.
For example, when I sought advice re. a perplexing problem that arose during the creation of sub-menu items, a tech instructed me (via email) that “Traction is meant to have just one horizontal row of items in each menu.” (Doesn’t Traction advertise “Custom Menus”?) I knew this wasn’t true as I had already successfully set up sub-menu items for two tabs. It took me days to fix the problem and this issue is not addressed anywhere in the WP Support web pages. (I had consulted a second tech without success.)
The latest problem: The Traction theme does not support a byline but my byline suddenly began to appear at the top of all of my new published posts yesterday. (It doesn’t appear in the HTML.) Even though I paid NOT to have a byline (and the inclusion of a byline is very awkward at my website), I’m now being instructed online that I can only delete the byline by upgrading to a CSS package. However, at least one forum tech has warned bloggers against dabbling in CSS unless one has had previous experience. Which I haven’t.
I realize that software programs will sometimes have unavoidable glitches and I don’t fault WP when this occurs. I enjoy WP designs and your technicians’ invariably pleasant attitudes. However, I can’t in all honesty recommend WP until it offers better Support web pages and provides better training for its technicians.
Feel free to delete this comment after reading it. My reason for posting this is to attract the attention of someone who may be in a position of authority who can make changes.
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@chambersinhawaii50
This is a peer support forum. thesacredpath, myself and all the others answering questions that do not have silver background patches behind their usernames are Volunteers. We cannot edit or delete or move threads. Volunteer Moderators can move threads and have some minimal editing and close threads and Staff can too but we cannot.Also note that we Volunteers answering questions on this forum have no access or knowledge of any of the Premium themes how they are designed to operate. When you purchased your premium theme what came with that purchase was support directly from the theme designer in the Premium Themes Forum.
When purchasing an annually renewable custom design upgrade one is entitled to full Staff support as in part that’s what they are paying for.
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I tried creating a category page and while it did work, and created a custom menu item, it deleted my other two menu items and would only allow the one category page menu to exist in the menu bar. Please help.
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@aongtumbler
You cannot create category pages. They are automatically created by the software and display only after you publish a post that you have assigned a category to. If you have published Posts (not pages) and assigned Categories to them, and included those Categories in the custom menu but they are not displaying try what follows:Troubleshooting – My custom menu isn’t appearing
Go to the custom menu page in the dashboard Appearance > Menus and in the “theme location” module at upper left select your custom menu from the pulldown and then click “save”. -
@songtumbler, when you go with a custom menu, you have to add in all the things you want to appear in the top navigation. Go back to the custom menu and add in the pages and whatever else you want and arrange them as you see fit by drag and drop and then save the menu, and as Timethief says, make sure your custom menu is selected in the theme location dropdown.
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