Textbook – Customizing which posts display on main page

  • Unknown's avatar
    fancypegleg · Member ·

    Hi, is there any way to customize the grid of post previews in the Textbook theme? Specifically, I would like configure the grid so that it excludes posts of specific categories I designate.

    My thinking is to use categories to mark certain types of posts as less important than my regular posts, and to have those filtered out of the preview grid so that the important content is featured more prominently. Is there a way to do this? If not, is there a better way to accomplish what I want to do?

    Thanks,
    Jonathan

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

  • staff-loquaciousloon · Staff ·

    Hi @fancypegleg!

    There isn’t a way to exclude specific categories from the home page, no. Hiding them with CSS results in broken spacing in the grid as well, so that won’t do the trick.

    I’d recommend going the Featured Content route. You can specify which posts are most important, and then they’ll be displayed in a separate section. Check out the Featured Content section of this page:
    https://wordpress.com/themes/textbook

    Short version:

    – open My Site > Customize > Featured Content
    – set a tag (you can just use the word Featured
    – edit your posts, and apply that tag to any post that you want to feature.

    That will pull the three most recent Featured Items into a special section on the home page for you.

  • Unknown's avatar
    fancypegleg · Member ·

    Thanks for the detailed response! I think your suggestion about using the featured content section is probably the best way for me to go at this point.

    One aspect of all this that has been a little confusing to me is the limitations of the the WordPress platform when using it along with wordpress.com for hosting. It’s my understanding (and please correct me if I’m mistaken) that if I host my website with another company and install WordPress on my site, then I’m allowed more than one blog page, access to plugins, and so on. This feels counterintuitive to me. It’s as if hosting my site with WordPress.com means I only get access to a hobbled version of the WordPress software. Am I missing something, or this the way it’s supposed to be?

  • staff-loquaciousloon · Staff ·

    There are definite differences, yes :)

    Basically (this is the short version) if you install WordPress (from WordPress.org) on your own server or paid hosting account, you’re running the software independently. You can access the code directly, you can install plugins, etc. It also means that you need to take care of things like the hosting account, and security, and updates – all of the technical maintenance that goes into running a website.

    Here at WordPress.com, that technical maintenance stuff is all handled for you. You aren’t able to access the code or install plugins directly, because we’re managing the code and keeping it secure on this end.

    This is the single best article I’ve ever seen on the differences: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/com-or-org/ :)

    One thing you mentioned was multiple blog (posts) pages – that isn’t something WordPress (or most themes) will support out of the box – you’d likely need to look for a plugin or make some customizations. By definition, a “Posts Page” is the page that shows all of your blog posts.

    You can separate posts into their individual categories, using Category Pages. That won’t remove items from the front page, but it does let you organize your posts into different listings :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    fancypegleg · Member ·

    Thanks, this clears things up a bit. Although I had a read a few articles about the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, none of them did much to explain why these differences exist. Now it makes much more sense to me.

  • staff-loquaciousloon · Staff ·

    Happy to help!

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