Sorting of Posts on WP Admin Dashboard

It doesn’t stay sorted since that’s not the default behavior for posts. Posts are meant to be chronologically sorted since its a “blog”. Curious as to why you need them alphabetically sorted? Since that’s more suitable for pages, and that’s how pages are sorted by default. Perhaps the content you have in posts are more suitable as pages?

You would also notice that when you sort them by clicking on “Title” in header, the URL in address bar of the browser changes. If you bookmark that URL, then you can always have it sorted by default? Probably no good.

If you still want it otherwise, I found this piece of code that claims to do it.

Thanks for responding. Maybe I don’t understand the difference between a post and a page well enough, but I think the “blog” that I am building is a bit different from the norm. The object of the website is to post a discussion about economic theory which permits people to respond and discuss the ideas. The presentation of the ideas is broken down into a series of what I assumed should be posts since I want each one to have a comment section that permits readers to comment on the ideas in that post. Each post also contains a sidebar with links to 15 or so topics, anyone of which might have its own navigation bar to 4 or 5 subtopics, all of which I consider “posts” since I want to encourage discussion of the ideas. The only “pages” I have so far are the home page, an about page and a contact page. I may also use pages to post a bibliography or other PDF papers on a given topic where there would be no comment section.

So the reason that I like the posts sorted alphabetically is that it makes it easier for me to move from one post to another while I am still editing the original content. The “blog” will not go live until I have a fully edited version of the content on probably 40 “posts.”

Bookmarking the URL for the posts sorted by topic does not seem any easier than just repeatedly clicking on Topic, but the link you provided is the actual answer to what I am looking for if I can muster the courage to edit the code in the theme’s functions.php file.

Both are essentially HTML pages of your website, but there are some assumptions around both which is the difference you see here. Posts are meant to be time based content that you push out to readers – like a journal log. Pages are forever live content. There are differences in URL, but that can be tweaked in Settings > Permalinks in WordPress admin panel.

This is why default sorting for posts is chronological – most recent on the top.

Comments are by default not enabled on pages, but you can enable them if you require.

Whether post or page has a sidebar or not, is totally dependent on how the WordPress theme you are using, has chosen to show them. Some themes would let us choose layouts as well, so you can have sidebar no pages as well.

Thanks again. This is helpful, but the distinction between pages and posts seems a bit arbitrary if pages can be set to allow comments. I’d be interested in knowing where I can set this. The idea that pages are “forever live” seems to imply that posts go away after some time. The distinction is simply a matter of priority in the structure of the website. While I understand that themes are meant to make it easier to build a website, I am never comfortable with an application that assumes it knows better than I do how I want a website to look and work.

I can now see how to enable comments on a page. If I wanted to convert 36 posts to pages, is there a simple way to do that? I doubt that it is worth the trouble at this point, but do you think I should use pages for the entire website if I do not want things to be prioritized in terms of the date they were created?

How your website shows content, is based on the theme you are choosing. So you find up the right layout you want by choosing the right theme. WordPress also has Full site editing themes now and you can customize things with that too. Its a lot to take in, so go about learning it on the side before you decide to change your site.

I think its totally up to you to see how you can make it work as per how you want it. You can’t go very wrong with either page vs post. Additionally this plugin enables you to make post to page or vice versa. So give it a try and have fun with it ??

Thanks again. I am probably going to just leave the posts as posts. I am under the impression that changing a post to a page will alter is URL and break all the links to it in the website. For me this could mean manually resetting hundreds of link. Does the Post Type Switcher plugin deal with this potential problem?