Pages and Posts don't appear to work the way I thought they would
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Hi,
I’ve been through the first several sections of the tutorial, and my question hasn’t been answered yet. I think I must be missing some key concept or something.
My partner and I are trying to make a blog that will cover several of our interests. The blog name is Science Anywhere. So I’ve chosen the Intergalactic theme, created the home page (About Us) and 3 sub pages (Science, Education, Science Fiction) (I’ve also made these categories but I don’t see how to link the categories with the pages and it isn’t clear if it is necessary) and I’ve made a menu so that if someone comes in on the home page they’ll be able to see the home page and then go to the page that they are interested in. The menu works in that they can go there and select a page and go to the page they want. However when you click on the home page (About Us) all the text that I created for the other 3 pages shows up here and the text that is unique to the home page appears way at the bottom. (why?) Finally I created a test post and gave it an Education category (cause I’m learning). I wasn’t given a choice as to what page it should appear on. I can’t see that test post in any of the pages.
I was hoping that if someone wanted to see that post they would come to the home page, click on the menu and select the Education Page, and then see the Education Page text and find to post below it. So what am I missing?
Thanks,
Ron
(email visible only to moderators and staff)The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there. For the difference between posts and pages, see here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/post-vs-page/
Shortly, pages are static, meant for content that isn’t updated regularly. They don’t appear in your blog’s feed, subscribers don’t get updates about new pages and you can’t assign categories and tags to pages.
Posts are for content that’s regularly updated. They appear in your RSS feed and are indexed by search engines more regularly than pages. They can be sorted into categories and the publication date forms part of the post’s URL.
If you want all posts about a specific topic to appear on a certain page, then you’ll need to set up a special type of page called Category Pages. That can only be done by using a custom menu. Category pages can’t contain any static content like regular pages. See these links for complete info on Category Pages:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/category-pages/
http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/posts-on-pages/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/ -
Thank-you Kokkieh,
That was helpful. I now seem to have my menu working the way I want now. My dummy posts show up where I expect them to, although I had to make separate menu choices for the pages and the category pages. Not as slick as I imagined, but still very workable so not a problem.
The only thing that remains to fix my first attempt at creating a WordPress site is what is displayed on the home (About Us) page. If I click on one of the subpages in the menu they display as expected, but when I click on the home page (or if I just enter the site) it shows the text from all the pages in the reverse order in which I created them. As a result the About Us text is at the very bottom because I created it first. I don't want any of the sub-pages text to show here at all just the About Us text. I'm going to keep playing in the pages area to see if I can discover why this is, but any pointers would be very appreciated.
Thank-you again.
Ron
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but when I click on the home page (or if I just enter the site) it shows the text from all the pages in the reverse order
You’re still mixing up posts and pages. What you see on the home page and on Category Pages are posts. Posts are distinguished from static pages in that they have a date in the URL. As an example from my blog:
Post: https://kokkieh.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/a-good-woman-is-hard-to-find/
Page: https://kokkieh.wordpress.com/about-blog/Note that the post contains a date as posts are displayed in reverse chronological order on the home page and category pages. Static pages don’t have a date, as pages are for content that stays in place for a long time, unlike posts which are constantly updated. That’s how a blog works.
As a result the About Us text is at the very bottom because I created it first.
It sounds like you put your About Us text in a post instead of a page. You need to go to Pages ->Add New and publish that text as a static page. If you want that page to be your blog’s home page you then need to set it as such under Settings ->Reading in the dashboard. Instructions to create a static home page can be found here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/front-page/
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Hi Kokkieh,
That fixed it! Thank-you.
I wasn’t confusing pages and posts anymore, and all the page text was entered in the page editing section so I was baffled. However I missed the last step where you make a special page called Posts with no text and in Settings>Reading Settings you insert it in the Posts page field. I had my home page in both the Front page field and the Posts page field so I guess it was treating my page texts as a kind of blog in itself … or something like that. As soon as I took that final step everything worked.
You’ve saved me a lot of time. I would have been forever trying to find that little detail.
Thank-you very much.
Ron
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