pages vs. posts vs. categories

  • Hi,

    I’m new to WordPress and need some advises as few procedures are confusing.

    Here is the structure I try to establish:
    Blog main page (index page with excerpts to the last 5 to 10 newest posts)
    Other blog pages (one page per cat: general, events, music, social, travel, …, comments)
    my Bio page (one page with just one post, no comments, personal cat)
    my Photo page (one page with as many pictures I want, no comments, personal cat)
    my Demo page (one page with 3 different posts, comments, personal cat)
    Contact page (one page with a contact form)
    Guestbook page (one page, uncategorized)
    my Links page (one page, link categories)
    Archives page (one page, sorted)
    To comment people will have to register and login.

    From the codex I understand that when one creates a page the post associated to it can’t have the category modified. It always defaults to the same initial one called un categorized (which can be renamed: I renamed “uncategoried” to “general”).

    I assume that on the index page all new posts will appear and appended to each, their respective category.

    As I’m creating a new page and post using the page template I do check mark “allow comments” but the ending post tag only shows “Edit this entry”, how does one add a comment?

    I would like to create a “demo page”, one page with 3 posts (3 music demo) that people could independently comment, but
    1) How do I include 3 posts?
    2) I would like the category to be “personal” and not “general”,
    3) Those 3 posts shouldn’t appear on any other page.

    So the proper procedure would be to:
    1) establish the categories before creating the pages
    2) establish the link categories and after populate the links
    3) creating the links page or archives page using the templates can be done even if there are no links, categories or posts.

    What I’m trying to figure out are the initial steps to setup the site, there is so much cross referenced info in the codex that I’m lost. please advise me,

    Regards,
    Eric

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • There are a lot of questions in there, but let me touch on the basics first. A, you really need to be sure you understand the difference between Page, and page. a Page is a “static” Page created with the write Page feature. a page is simply some output of your posts, be it all posts in one category, a single post, etc. Pages
    Regarding the Page not having comments, that’s probably the result of your Page template not being designed to allow for comments. It’s really a matter of adding some code to the template, or creating your own, for the various ideas you have. Pages#Page_Templates
    Regarding the Demos. If you create a category called “Personal”, and you don’t want them to appear anywhere else, then you’ll have to modify your other pages code to exclude anywhere they could potentially show up. Primarily your index.php. The_Loop#Exclude_Posts_From_Some_Category

    Then you can create a category page JUST for “personal”
    Category_Templates

    It sounds like you are going to need to do quite a bit of modifying of the templates and theme. It CAN BE DONE! My suggestion would be to take one step at a time, and when you run into a problem, check back to the forums with a specific problem, resolve it, move to the next, run into a problem, rinse and repeat.

    milb is right… it can be done, but from the way you’ve explained this, my advice is to think in terms of categories rather than “pages”. You can link to a category that becomes a “web page” when the link is clicked, and by using “conditionals” and setting the WordPress loop in various ways you will be able to control the presentation of the posts the specified category.

    It’s all there in the codex.

    I think you will find it harder to create actual WordPress “Pages” (in admin “write new page”) that display specific categories of post.

    Thread Starter wabs

    (@wabs)

    Hi,

    Thanks miklb and pcmt for your advises, they were very helpful.

    I did the following:
    1) created a demo category (it is the cat’8′);
    2) created a category-8.php template for the 3 demo posts;
    3) created a page-demo.php and assigned it as a template to the demo Page, in it a first loop to get the Page content followed by a loop on cat’8′;
    4) exclude the cat’8′ from the main Page (using !(in_category('8') && is_home());
    5) excluded the cat’8′ from the category list on the sidebar;

    As per your experience do you see occurring an eventual problem later on? if not, it would allow creating various Pages with posts and comments using the pages tools instead of using the file editor to modify the “sticky” div on top of a category template.

    it seems to work but I might have broken something as I can’t use the comment form, every time I try to mail a comment I get the following message:

    403 Forbidden
    You don’t have permission to access /eleanore/blog/wp-comments-post.php on this server.

    As I didn’t yet try to use the permalink option I didn’t create a .htaccess file but I did set up file permissions as suggested on <a href="https://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/"></a>.

    Regards,
    Eric

    Thread Starter wabs

    (@wabs)

    just to let know that for some reason wp-comments-post.php wasn’t set to 664

    Thanks again,
    Eric

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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