php newbie needs lots of help

moshu and Shari,
Thanks, I appreciate the reality check. Clearly I have to read and learn the lingo. Hear that it took “several hours a day for a couple of months” for Shari to come up to speed on WP themes helped my ego a lot. My “rush” is to make something “now” to produce good screen dumps for my extremely late print magazine. Ain’t gonna happen.

I’ve printed out the Codex for Pages and already see where I was off base. I’ll make sure to learn “posts” as well. I’m still not convinced that Blogs are the thing I’m looking for. TalkBack’s Comments on html pages may actually serve my purpose. Has anyone else bridged that gap? What does WP do that I can’t do with html/TalkBack comments?
Thanks again,
John

I would be glad to give you a precise answer about the differences between html+talkback and WP… I just have no idea what that talkback thing is ??

In general, WP vs. html – with WP you have a dynamic database driven website with a very convenient user interface (the admin panel) to add new content on the fly, so to speak.

And since you mentioned a “magazine”: searching for magazine or online magazine or newspaper and similar keywords should bring up some amazing exmples what WP users were able to achieve using WP for their magazines.

TalkBack:
https://www.scripts.oldguy.us/talkback/
Nice sample: https://www.1914-1918.net/hallofmemory.php

No to be argumentative, moshu, but “very convenient user interface (the admin panel)” is a stretch…except for you php gurus. It’s not at all intuitive, after a week at it, I’m still unable to modify https://imcool.com/wordpress/ to be anyway near useful and user friendly to visitors.

I’m pulling its announcement, or at least any graphic, from my print magazine. I thank you all for your help but I just don’t have time to put my life on hold to learn the thousands of terms, commands, code, etc., to produce a workable site. I sit this one out for a month or so (to hopefully get over the frustration of failure).

There probably are many online magazines written in WP, but I’ll bet none were constructed by a novice like me. I’m not complaining…”a man’s got to know his limitations”…chuckle. I do have a nice running php-driven site, https://www.goHTSN.com, that uses the Article Manager script. That’s more my level. Cheers,
John

I understand.

(just for the record: I said convenient interface for adding content – NOT for designing/modifying the look!
+ I am totally PHP illiterate, everybody knows that; however I have strong html and css skills, that’s true)

Sorry, I misunderstood/misread your PHP knowledge.

To correct a mistake in my last post, https://www.goHTSN.com is a cgi script, not php. John

Moshu, you can’t be PHP illiterate… haven’t you designed several themes? I’m CSS/HTML literate, but I can only mod themes and only then with limits because I don’t know a lot about the PHP tags that I need to use/modify!

Why when I create a “category” does it appear twice, as a black text topic (?) and a blue link?

Hi cpmjohn, i also had the same problem as you. Here is how i fixed it. Instead of wp_list_categories, change to wp_list_cats

This will remove the duplicate category name.