Creating a URL

Try a different approach.

1) Create a WordPress PAGE (not post) called Blog. That will give you a permalink URL of domain.com/blog

2) Now you need to tell WordPress to display posts from the category blog on the page called blog.

Open your theme’s file page.php in an editor. If you don’t have an editor you can use the WP online editor in the Appearance section of the Dashboard menu. Location of the page.php file:
/wp-content/themes/{themename}/page.php

find the start of the WordPress loop:
( loop looks something like this- sometimes on one line)

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
   <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

add this code before the lines above

<?php
if (is_page('blog')) {
  $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
  query_posts("category_name=blog&paged=$paged");
} ?>

Save the page.php file.

What is happening here: you’ve created a page with the url of
domain.com/blog
On that page you are displaying all the posts from the blog category.
This creates what you are looking for. If the first post has a permalink of lost-my-cat
its URL will now be domain.com/blog/lost-my-cat

You are a STAR! Thank you, that worked pretty well. Just a few slight issues – it’s only showing the last 3 posts (with no links to “read previous ones”), and they are all “expanded”. The theme previously was showing snippets only, and would take the first image from the blog post and display it as a thumbnail using Tim Thumb, which I’m totally unfamiliar with.

Any idea how I could achieve that? I’m so grateful for your help, because doing the programming side of things is definitely something I couldn’t have done.

well, you could make a copy of index.php, and call it something else…say blog.php

<?php
/*
Template Name: Blog
*/
?>

put that at the very top

and then do the same edit you did to page.php above.

Then, in the page editor for your blog page, assign the blog template to it from the dropdown in the right column. That will cause it to use the copy of index.php we just made, which will display the posts the same way they used to be displayed

Thanks for the response Rev. Voodoo!

Unfortunately I can’t quite follow the last part of your instructions. Are you referring to editing the page in the page editor section (Appearance —> Editor)?

I followed your instructions so far – copied index.php, renamed it blog.php, inserted the

<?php
/*
Template Name: Blog
*/
?>

At the very top of the file, and then inserted

<?php
if (is_page('blog')) {
  $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
  query_posts("category_name=blog&paged=$paged");
} ?>

Just before the “if have posts” part of the code.

But after that I’m lost – is the blog.php suppose to be the new index page? Any help would be much much much appreciated, unfortunately I don’t have a single shred of programming experience, so I’m just picking up as I go…