How to organize articles on sidebar
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I’m trying to figure out how to get my articles on the sidebar organized by topic heading. Right now I have the topic headings as parent pages, and each article is a child page. That looks okay, but having the topic headings as actual pages means that people will click on the heading and open up a blank page.
The other alternative I toyed with was having each of the 3 topic headings as a Pages widget, but then with 3 of those widgets I’d have to enter the page numbers to exclude, and that would be a major hassle with so many pages.
I originally had all the articles as posts, but couldn’t figure out how to get the post titles to show up on the sidebar, so I made them all pages.
Any other suggestions? I plan to upgrade to CSS editing to get rid of the horizontal menu which at present is non-functional.
Thanks in advance.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Sorry, I thought my website URL would show up in that post. It’s http://heilkunststudies.wordpress.com.
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Hi Karen,
Pictures are worth a 1,000 words. :) In this case we have no URL to your blog and cannot view it. Therefore, we can only imaging which of the over 70 themes you may have chosen. Please post the URL for the blog in question, starting with http:// -
Oh wow. You can get the post titles to show up in the sidebar if you just use the Recent Posts and Archives widgets. Add the Category or Tag Cloud widgets for good measure and you’re done.
Pages are a terrible way of organizing your site if you’ve got more than 4 or 5. They have virtually no googlejuice at all.
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It’s going to be a lot of work to make them Posts again, as you know, but it will pay off in the long run, trust me.
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@karenrrobinson
I’m using the Vigilance theme also. I agree with raincoaster’s widget selections and her advice.Click here and see the sidebar widget choices we have > http://en.support.wordpress.com/topic/widgets-sidebars/
Click any individual widget link in that line-up and you will find descriptions, information and instructions for installing them.As you haven’t been using widgets reading this is a good idea too > http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-no-widgets-paradox/
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Terrific, thanks so much to both of you. I actually never deleted the posts, so this won’t be quite so daunting a task!
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Ha, being anal in certain ways does come in handy at times ;-).
But.. I’m finding that the recent posts and archives widgets aren’t going to be enough. I really want to have the whole menu of posts displayed on the sidebar, not just the last 15. Maybe that just isn’t doable in this format?
I have another wordpress site that is too big for me to manage on my own, so I had paid someone to do that, who created a drop-down list of articles on the navigation menu, http://guideforselfhealing.com/home. I’m not sure which plugin he used. But that worked ok and I’d like to be able to do something like that on this new blog to get individual posts accessible from the nav menu.
I’d be willing to pay for hosting, but to install wordpress myself is just a little daunting! So for now, I’m trying to work with what I’ve got.
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You can use archives shortcode:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/archives-shortcode/
[archives type=postbypost] -
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Yes, it’s a nice theme. I’d have used it, but it doesn’t support the excerpt function which I love.
At the risk of spreading rumors, there may be a new theme is coming that will support excerpts (and I think other cool stuff)… -
Very nice clean them and not un-Vigilance like and a slew of new features also. I don’t wanna chaaaaange! ;)
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That’s working great, although the posts will be one big list without categorization, which I could live with, unless there’s some other bit of magic :).
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Can’t you just switch the widget to showing a dropdown menu and having subcategories for each main category (like a category tree, albeit a very simple one). Cleans up a lot of space.
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@karenrrobinson
Yes, it will be one long list.
With a bit of hand coding (well, copy and paste) you could add categories. It’s tedious to begin, but not difficult. The thing is, every time you add another post, you will have to manually add it to your list. Again, not difficult but tedious. If you like, I can help you do it.
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