New here, and confused
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I am preparing a page devoted to the dramatic works of Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker. I’m new to WordPress and after completing a main page, a biographical page, a title page for one of the plays, and the first four scenes of that play, I publised everything to see how it looked. I’m getting links to every published page at the top of the screen, and at this rate by the time i’ve finished one play, they will be too cumbersome, and you’d have to scroll way down to see the beginning of that page’s text.
The friend that recommended WordPress to me suggested that I created them as “pages” rather than “posts.” Could this be the source of the problem? If so, is there an easy way to convert them to “posts” or should I just delete them all and start over?The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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You are creating Pages rather than creating Posts. Please see here so you are clear on all the differences between the two. Note also that there is no way to automatically change posts to pages and visa versa. Pages are for static content that rarely changes and sit outside the blog structure.
Staff have provided help for those who want to structure their blog like a website. > http://en.support.wordpress.com/using-wordpress-to-create-a-website/ There is only one dynamic page in a blog for posts and we cannot post to more than that one page. But we can create the appearance that we have posted to more than one page.
We organize our posts by assigning Categories to them. When we publish a post it automatically appears on the running page for posts and also on the Categories pages and Archives pages. Note: There must be one published post in each Category in order for there to be anything to display.
A custom menu allows you to display Categories with drop-downs to sub-categories in tabs along the horizontal navigation where normally only Pages tabs are displayed. If you wish you can also include Pages with drop-downs to sub-pages and custom links in your custom menu as well. How to create a custom menu. http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/
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I forgot to mention that if you wish to convert your Pages to Posts then you must copy and paste the contents from the Pages into new Posts and after the posts have been published you delete the Pages you copied the content out of.
I’ve also viewed your blog and you may wish to create a book-like structure rather than conventional blog structure or a website like structure.
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If you want no date stamps, stick to pages. You can tidy up your top menu by creating dropdowns, or by displaying some of the pages in the top menu and the rest in the sidebar: both possible via the custom menu feature.
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Just a suggestion:
Change the Title of your site – Dashboard >> Settings >> General
Change the Tagline – Dashboard >> Settings >> General
More class and helps a search engine
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Thank you. I think I’m on the right track now. One further question. While I painstakingly cut and pasted all my “pages” and turned them into “posts,” all the while resetting my links between the pages, I kept getting e-mail messages telling me I had comments. They apparently consisted of “pingbacks,” and I have no idea what that means. Apparently, and to no surprise, I still have a lot to learn. Each one asked if I “approved.” Is this normal?
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Trackbacks/pingbacks show links to your posts. In your case, from other posts of yours (because you’ve added links to previous/next scene). You can delete them by clicking Comments in your dashboard sidebar, and you can disable the feature altogether: for published posts, uncheck the relevant option in the Discussion module of the post editor; for future posts, uncheck the relevant option in Settings>Discussion.
Or, if you prefer, you can keep the option enabled (so that you’ll be notified in case others link to your posts) but prevent the ones from your own blog only, by writing the URL for each link in a special way – see here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/pingbacks/#can-i-stop-self-pings -
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That was the suggestion from both Timethief above, and also from the friend who recommended WordPress to me in the first place. Getting it from two different sources, I figured they were on to something. I did consider your earlier comment as well, however.
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I don’t know about your friend, but timethief didn’t actually recommend that you do it: she tried to inform you of the differences between posts and pages, she suggested a few things you should be aware of if you use posts, and she linked to the Support doc on “using wordpress to create a [page oriented] website”. In my opinion, date stamps and categories are pointless in your case.
Now, as you can see, the Recent Posts widget displays posts in reverse chronological order. I would suggest you remove that widget and add a Custom Menu widget instead, after you go to Appearance>Menus and create a custom menu with the scenes in the right order (that’s possible regardless of whether the scenes are posts or pages).
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