Better Blog Page Template Navigation

[[email protected]]

So I am genuinely enjoying the Blog Page Template.It's a very easy way of querying a category or categories of posts.

And I am also enjoying the Genesis Subpages as Secondary Menu plugin. In particular, it resolves navigation issues with drop-down menus on smartphones. I have mixed feelings about drop-down menus and I think a great percentage of users are confused by them. The plug-in intuits a secondary menu very nicely once you set up your page hierarchy. BUT it doesn't work with categories.

I'm thinking of combining the two features on a site. I believe these features will in the long term make it easier for a client to maintain. The issue, however, is when an individual post is selected you have a navigation problem. Breadcrumbs and post-meta will link to the post's category, not back of a page of posts. I can disable post-meta to resolve the issue of going to a category. But that leaves a person with a single page and not a lot of points of reference. The site's not that deep that the person can't find his/her way back (and there is always the back button). But I'm wondering if anyone else has figured out a workaround.

Or, maybe blog page templates aren't that great afterall....

Thanks for any advice.

[cehwitham]

I think the best solution for this is to create a page using the blog page template for each of the categories that you have then use something like the Simple 301 Redirect plugin to redirect http://www.yoursite.com/category/my-category/ to http://www.yoursite.com/my-category where my-category is the slug of the blog page. You'll need to setup a redirect for each category but once this is done, you wont need to change any of the links in the breadcrumbs or post info as the old category links will just get redirected to the new blog page.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

Even though this plugin hasn't been updated for a while, I use it a lot and it works fine.

You may also find that Bill Ericksons plugin give you more options for your sub pages menu:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/be-subpages-widget/

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Twitter: cehwitham Web: cehwitham.com

[[email protected]]

Thanks for the suggestion. After looking at this harder I'm going to abandon the idea of using the blog-post template throughout the site. I'm going to go with Genesis Simple Menus plug-in. It's a bit of a pain (and will involve training people) to go through and create/edit and select a secondary menu per page or per custom post type. But the alternative -- creating redirects or else using a hook to bring in a custom post-meta that has to be updated with every addition of a custom post tye -- was the greater of two evils.

Or, I might decide on something else. 🙂

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