Should I use Pages or Categories
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http://internationalschoolsreview.wordpress.com/ I have created a blog where international teachers from our web site will post information on great, little know restaurants and things to do around the world. I have used pages (a page for each region of the world) as the structure of the blog.
Would I do better to make each country a category instead of a page. Being new to WordPress I don’t understand the long term consequences of how I am setting this up. Any help and advice would be well appreciated.Also, I notice that when I removed a category it was not possible to post to any of the pages. When I added back a category I could post again. Can someone explain this to me.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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You would do FAR better to make each a category rather than a page. Pages essentially get posted once and you can edit them any number of times but as far as search engines and readers and subscribers are concerned, they never change.
I’m not quite sure what your second paragraph means. When you use a category, the posts all come up on the blog page. They also appear on the category page. Pages themselves cannot be categorized.
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Thanks for your reply. I would like to ask you another question. What do you mean when you say pages never change. My thought was the posts would just accumulate over time on each page and then I would look for a way to categorize the posts within the page. Is this not possible? I suppose I am thinking in terms of a web site and not a blog. There will never be a reason to add any new topics to any of the pages. Can you please explain the long term difference I will experience making each country a category as oppossed to a page. This would be very helpful.
In my second paragraph I am trying to say that after creating the blog, I went to the blog from a different browser, so I wasn’t recognized and logged in automatically, and made a post. Immediately after clicking the submit button the post was visible to me. In the dashboard I deleted 6 of my 7 categories and after that when I tried to post to any page the progress bar moved across its field but my posted text was then visible on the page. Back in the dashboard I created a category and after that I could post again to any of the pages. This has me confused.
Thanks for your help with this. It’s a bit much to grasp all at once.
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This is what I meant to say: In the dashboard I deleted 6 of my 7 categories and after that when I tried to post to any page the progress bar moved across its field but my posted text was NOT visible on the page. Back in the dashboard I created a category and after that I could post again to any of the pages and the text was immediately visible. This has me confused.
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Pages and posts are very different. What you really want to do is Posts, and use Categories on them.
The terminology is messed up, but basically if you use the Category widget, anyone can get all of the posts in a Category by clicking on that category in the widget. You can see how it works on my blog. I have about 300 categories!
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Pages are designed for side information, e.g. a bio or an intro the blog. A page sits outside the chronological order of posts, but apart from that it’s like a post – one post: you cannot add posts to pages. There’s only one “page” for your posts: your blog front.
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Although when you click on a Category in the sidebar widget, a Category “Page” is constructed on the fly that includes all the posts on which you’ve used that category.
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Thanks everyone for your help. It sounds like categories work much like Google labels in which you assign a label to all mail from a specific person or mail based on a specific topic. As mail is received, veverything stacks up in your in box but when you want to see just mail from “Tony” you can click on the label (category) and only the mail from Tony will be ordered in the display. Am I on the right track?
Thanks again for your help on this. Paul
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internationalschoolsreview,
That’s a good way of looking at it!
And in your blog the categories don’t have to be just people: each post can be a person, a country, a restaurant, an interesting thing to do, as well as just a person writing it.
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