scribblerguy

3. Using Pretty Permalinks

Drop the “Home” page and add a Text Widget to your sidebar. Trying to do what you want using a page is complicated compared to the following.

In the Admin interface, click on Design and then Widgets. You’ll want to move a text widget from the left column over to the right column.

Then, edit the text widget. Leave the title blank and add the following to the main block of the text widget:

<a class="sidebar-home-link" href="/">Home</a>

The “<a>” tag is used to create standard hyperlinks. The href attribute is where the link address is contained. Instead of putting a long address (e.g. “https://www.themommydocuments.com”) I just used a relative path (“/”) which means the root of your website, aka, your homepage. The class=”sidebar-home-link” was added in case you ever wanted to style the link by editing your style.css file.

LIST -al is the raw command you’ll need. Your FTP program likely contains some sort of setting to enable this always for the appropriate server types or on a per server basis.

I tried a couple test comments. If you look at the error message, you’ll see the number “500.” This is a generic error message (along the lines of the “404” page/file/resource not found error.

A “500” error usually involves some sort of server misconfiguration. For Apache, these settings are saved in various config files.

if you leave a comment it gives you an error once you submit it. However, we are still able to publish it.

Since the actual posting of the comments is okay, then the issue must be related to something that WP is doing after that, namely, the redirect back to the post.

I’m thinking that this involves the permalink settings. Your site is not using pretty permalinks currently, but if you were, then your htaccess file with the rewrite instructions would likely still be in the root of your website.

Anyway, check to see if there is an htaccess file in your root and see what contents, if any, it has. If you have something close to the following, then at one time, pretty permalinks were set.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

In this case, go into WP and apply the pretty permalink settings. Then, try commenting again. If you get redirected back to the post, the problem should be solved.

If you’re still having problems, please detail your permalink settings and the contents of your htaccess file, if it exists.

The page is loading now, so, everything seems okay. Though, it looks my comment was flagged as spam and hidden from view. — I can see the comment in the source view.

All in all, this was probably some sort of server hiccup, so you should be good to go.

I posted a test comment to your latest post (“Commenting doesn’t work”) in Firefox 2.0.14. The post apparently went through. But, the page was broken. The last few lines are:

<li class="alt item" id="comment-2590">

		<div class="commententry">
                <img src="

Some PHP code in the theme of your comments.php is messed up. Could you post the part of that file around “<div class="commententry">“?

“The website cannot display the page.”

Was it a browser error message? If this was some sort of connection timeout, then there could have been a temporary disruption in your Internet connection, or the site’s server could have “hiccuped” or rebooted.

Check the code of your header.php. The opening tag of the title element is missing a “<” —
title>reager.no &raquo; Barbaren ute av buret</title>

When in doubt, validate.

There is plenty of information in the Codex.

Take some time and look at the Theme Development Section and the Developer Documentation page. I think you’ll learn that what you are trying to do would be better accomplished through a custom theme rather than a plugin.

There’s even a very nice example of varying content based on different conditions on the Conditional Tags page, which could be easily modified for other purposes.

Edit: That’s what I get for not refreshing and being distracted.

I can do the first way by adding a category “posts” to all posts and changing permalink settings as such,

You don’t need to add a category named “posts,” just change the permalink structure to something like “/posts/%postname%/”.

But if you’re really going to change the permalink structure, then all the old permalinks should be redirected. The Redirection plugin should be able to help with that. Haven’t checked if there are other good plugins.

WordPress does this for you. e.g., “www.your-blog-domain.com/category/article/”. See my reply, here, to a similar question.

The simplest thing to do is to use the <!--more--> tag after the first paragraph in your post. For the front page, archive pages, and similar, this will stop the content where-ever the “more” tag is placed.

You can also show an excerpt instead of the full content by replacing the_content() with the_excerpt() inside your theme’s index.php file. These functions are explained in the Codex (the Docs tab, above).

I also run into a “Page not found” when I either click on “No comments” at the bottom of the article, or on the article’s title.

You are using permalinks, but either your server does not have mod_rewrite enabled, the rewrite instructions have not been written to the proper htaccess file, or something else is wrong. See Using Permalinks.

This is only a CSS issue. I suggest that you download the Firefox browser (if it’s not installed already) and use the Firebug extension, which allows you to inspect individual elements on your page and see exactly what CSS is being applied.

Basically, your images inside your posts are set to “float: left;”. The easiest thing to do is to remove this float declaration.

Where did you get your theme from?

The original andreas09 theme is not a WordPress theme. It is a basic xhtml (i.e. static) template. There is a theme named wp-andreas09.

Is that what you are using? If so, can you post screenshots of your blog’s folder structure. E.g., the “/wp-content/themes/” folder and every folder inside it?

If you want to use the “index.php” of your theme as the front page, then disable the static home page. Go to Settings -> Reading Settings -> Front page displays and select the “Your latest posts” radio button.

Technically, the “index.php” in the root of your WP install is the home page. Thanks to the wonders of PHP and MySQL, WP just applies your options to dynamically display the home page content of your choice, whether it’s a “static” page or the index.php of your theme, which usually displays the most recent posts.

Does that help? Or is there something else you are trying to do? If so, please be more specific.