wordpress 101 - pages
DESCRIPTION
This lesson looks at how pages are organized and how you can put them to work as part of your family research.TRANSCRIPT
WordPress 101
Pages
Denise Barrett Olson
A Moultrie Creek Guide
While blog posts are a streaming list of articles that, once published, tend to disappear quickly into your archives, pages can always be found exactly where you put them. Most of us are familiar with the “About” page used to describe the purpose of the blog and introduce the author. With WordPress pages, you can have as many as you want and put them to work in many useful ways. This lesson introduces pages and takes a look at several ways they can support your family history efforts.
When you first set up a blog at WordPress.com, the About page will be created for you. At first glance, it looks very much like the post editor screen - and it is. There is no Excerpt and the Page Attributes box in the sidebar replaces the Categories and Tags boxes found on posts.
Right now you only see two elements in the Page Attributes box: Template and Order. The Template item lets you select which layout template you want to use for this page. Your selection of templates will depend on the theme you have chosen. My options with this theme are the Default Template and Full Width. If I chose the Full Width option, when I view this page on the site, the content will extend the full width of the theme’s area. There will not be a sidebar. The Default Template includes the sidebar.
Order defines how your pages will be organized on your site’s menus. The default order is alphabetical, but you can change that by entering a number in the Order field for each of your pages.
As soon as you add a new page, you’ll discover a new attribute appears - Parent. While posts are organized by Categories, pages are organized in a Parent/Child relationship. Top-level pages have no parent. Everything else does. You can carry this down multiple levels if necessary.
By combining the Parent attribute with the Order attribute, you can arrange and re-arrange pages to suit your needs. Order numbering restarts at each “generational” level. Yes, this can be a bit tedious to maintain, but it gives you complete control over how your pages are organized.
The page list looks a bit different too. Notice the dashes in front of the page names. This shows the parent/child relationship. My Family History is a child of the About page while the Barkers, Barretts and Gervais are children of My Family History. Texas is a child of Gervais.
One thing to note when assigning relationships . . . Only published pages show up in the Parent drop-down list. In this example, I had to publish the Gervais page before I could assign the Texas page as its child. I then returned the Gervais page to draft status.
So, how do you put pages to work?
This is my Barker page. The top section is a “family sheet” linking to each family’s page at WeRelate. Below that I’m listing the stories I’ve written about this family.
If you’re like me, you’ve got family history strewn all over the Internet. Use your pages as an index to all that content. Link to your photo albums at Flickr, family trees at WeRelate or Ancestry, memorials at Find A Grave.
My page is a bit bare [okay, neglected], but you could include photos, vital details and a short history of the family or person.
You can also include your research logs as pages. That way, you’ll have access to them from anywhere. If you don’t want them visible to all, just check the Private box in the visibility section before you publish your page.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
For more information regarding this publication contact me at http://moultriecreek.us or by email at [email protected].
TipsIf you expect to insert additional pages at a later date, you may want to number early pages in increments of 10 (10, 20, 30, etc.) so you have flexibility for inserting more pages later.
The page order is most important when using your theme’s default menus. When creating your own custom menus, you can arrange pages in any order you want.
As your collection of pages grow, it can be difficult to find them in the pages list. Take advantage of the Search function at the top of the list to quickly narrow your choices.
ResourcesWordPress.com blog platformWordPress documentationWordPress TVMoultrie Creek Gazette