Students need help

  • Unknown's avatar
    apjgibson · Member ·

    My students have created WordPress.com websites to use in class, free sites. Two students have run into issues I’ve never seen before.
    at bcwilliams22.wordpress.com and rosie481304723.wordpress.com
    Instead of showing their theme and updating when they post, when I click on those links to see their work, WordPress acts like it’s a site that doesn’t exist. We had a workaround where if they added categories I can now see those. Before the categories were added it was a white page with the words Rosie’s writing or Brandon’s writing as links but when clicked went to nothing. The sites have been launched and are set to public. I realize this isn’t a very good job explaining what happened but maybe it rings a bell with someone?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-blorbo · Staff ·

    The sites do exist, but the main problem is they both have a page with absolutely no content set as the front page: https://wordpress.com/support/pages/front-page/

    They could either add content to that page, or set the front page back to display their latest posts.

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Firstly, I think this is super cool! Secondly as you would imagine it’s difficult for me to help since technically you are not the “owner” of those sites, and as a matter of policy we can only help the owner of a site with issues like this.

    But, having looked at both of those sites I can suggest setting the homepage of the site to display latests posts (instead of a more traditional “static” homepage) so that recent content they publish is visible as soon as you see the site.

    To do that please direct your students to go to their customizer (https://wordpress.com/customize/) and when the page loads, click on the “homepage settings” tab on the left.

    Once on that settings page, click the option “Your homepage displays
    Your latest posts” and then save all changes.

    Here’s a video you can share so they can follow those steps more easily: https://d.pr/v/BVfCF6

    You can see in the video, as soon as I choose that option the homepage of my site is populated by the blog posts I have on the site. If you have all your students do this then there will be no need to use categories as a workaround and you will be able to plainly see recent posts when you visit their sites.

    Hope this helps!

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