This isn’t a ‘fix’ but rather, a question. I’ve always wanted to display blog posts on my home page, but that may now be changing.
In the settings / Reading section, there’s a section ‘Your homepage displays’. In this section, there are two entries – the first is for ‘your homepage displays’, and has options ‘default’, or any page you have in your site. If you leave it as ‘default’, then the homepage design of the current theme is used. If you change it to a page, then that page is displayed. All makes perfect sense – you are toggling between ‘default, theme homepage’ and a dedicated page you choose.
But then there’s a second entry ‘Default Posts Page’, another dropdown. This dropdown offers the same list as the first entry – any page you have in your site. I can’t understand what the purpose / intent of this ‘choice’ is; you can only have one homepage on your site, and that’s controlled by the first entry so what is the purpose of this second choice? A document says “(Optional) Set the ‘Default Posts Page’ if you choose to use a custom homepage.”
So – if you leave the first setting at ‘Default’, you get the theme’s homepage. But if you change the first setting to (eg) ‘my landing page’, then what value is the second setting – you’ve already said where the visitor will ‘land’.
Hi @steerpike58, When the first option is left as default, the theme’s homepage functions normally. In some themes, this default setting means that the homepage displays as intended. The second option, when set as default, typically designates the blog posts page of the theme.
When you make changes, you can create a new homepage in the first section and set it accordingly. For the second option, you can create a blog page and select it as the page that displays all the posts.
Thanks for responding. Sorry, I’m still confused. I should further add, I’m working on a self-hosted site (at release 6.5.4) as well as a wordpress.com site (using the new wordpress.com site as a way to look at a fresh environment without all the baggage of my 10+ year old self-hosted environment), and they present different options for the ‘homepage’. On my self-hosted site, I have a different set of options for ‘homepage’ under settings/reading. Hopefully a couple of screen-shots pasted side-by-side below will help explain:
Note that on the right hand version (self-hosted), There are two choices initially – ‘your latest posts’ OR, ‘a static page’. That is a choice I can understand, if it just ended there – ‘posts’ OR ‘static page’.
But, if you choose ‘a static page’, THEN you get two further things to specify – ‘Homepage’ and ‘Posts page’. But you just said you didn’t want ‘your latest posts’, so what’s the reason for ‘posts page’ being there – surely, ‘posts page’ is the same thing as ‘your latest posts’?
So my very FUNDAMENTAL first question is this – On the internet in general, there can only be ONE entity (I’ll avoid the word ‘page’ as it seems to mean something special in WP) displayed when a user visits ‘mywebsite.com’ – that’s the ‘home page’ in casual terms. Now, for WordPress sites, this ‘home page’ (the entity that is displayed when no further qualification other than ‘mywebsite.com’ is given) can be EITHER – a ‘static page’ (static content) or a ‘Posts page’ (a page that shows the ever-changing content of your blog). But it can’t be both; it must be one or the other.
So what is the purpose, in the above settings, to show both a ‘homepage’ and a ‘posts page’ option as if both exist concurrently? I understand that you could, for example, have a ‘static’ home page as the response for the base url (‘mywebsite.com’), and a posts page with a more qualified url (‘mywebsite.com/blogs‘, for example) – but you can only have one ‘thing’ displayed if the user only types in ‘mywebsite.com’.
I’ve read that there’s a lot of confusion with WordPress because it was initially designed as a blogging tool, and displaying blog posts was the ‘standard’. A lot of themes and templates were created that assumed that the home page would be a sequence of blogs. Then along came ‘static pages’. To me, what would make more sense would be a simple choice – ‘what do you want your homepage to be?’ – a simple static page, or a ‘page of posts’? Then have a template that is best applied to static pages, and a template that is best applied to a ‘page of posts’. I note that in the current ‘theme’ I’m playing with (Bute), the ‘Front Page Template’ is more like a page than a template (or perhaps, it’s a combo or hybrid?). I didn’t have to build a ‘page’ at all, just edit the template (but shouldn’t I be editing pages, and then applying templates for ‘appearance’?). Is this all about keeping things simple for non-technical users?
Putting it another way – WordPress let’s you create ‘pages’. The block editor is very powerful and lets you create static pages, pages full of blog contents, pages full of blog headings, etc. Why doesn’t the main ‘settings’ page simply ask – “what page do you want to be the default” (when the user just enters ‘mywebsite.com’)? You tell it what page, and you are done. And then, you can pick whatever template you want to ‘control’ that page. What I also don’t understand is, I see things like (for the index template, as an example) “Used as a fallback template for all pages when a more specific template is not defined.” Surely, EVERY page has a template assigned by default (‘Pages’), and you can’t delete a template from a page if you wanted to, so how can you ever have a situation where a ‘more specific template is not defined’?
Sorry, this has ended up being a long ramble … hopefully you can get my meaning!
