A Moultrie Creek Guide

WordPress 101

Pages
Denise Barrett Olson

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 themes area. There will not be a sidebar. The Default Template includes the sidebar. Order defines how your pages will be organized on your sites 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, youll 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 familys page at WeRelate. Below that Im listing the stories Ive written about this family. If youre like me, youve 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, youll have access to them from anywhere. If you dont want them visible to all, just check the Private box in the visibility section before you publish your page.

Tips

If 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 themes 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.

Resources

WordPress.com blog platform WordPress documentation WordPress TV Moultrie Creek Gazette

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