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I publish books for clients and want to promote them on my Education Theme site when done but I don't want to intermix them with my regular blog posts. I want people to find this area of my site, look at a few books on one screen load, then go forward to the next screen full of books, and so on. Using Pages is unwieldy. Is there a way to segregate posts so that certain ones showed up on the book list and all others are treated like normal blog posts? Thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have.
What you're looking for really comes down to site setup. You can create a new category, perhaps called "Books". Then, you'd put either a link to that category on your menu or a page which would automatically pull posts from the Books category. The category approach works nicely because you can tell Genesis to display info above that specific category (e.g., "Here are some books I've published and encourage you to read."), which would be followed by an archive of the posts in that category.
That leads to the issue that these posts will be in your normal blog loop, but that is fixable. You can fix it in 1 of several ways. One way is to add a new category called "Blog" and put all the posts you want to appear on your blog in the Blog category. Then, you adjust your Genesis setting to only show the Blog category. Since the Books posts aren't in that category, they won't appear. That approach works fine if you have a small # of posts and don't mind editing them.
Another approach is to adjust the page template used to create your blog. This method involves creating and modifying a page template in your child theme folder to display all the categories you want EXCEPT Books. This method is suitable if there are too many posts to edit.
If these methods might work for you or if you need help creating a page template, post back.
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Thanks Bill for the thorough explanation. A couple follow-ups.
I like your category=blog suggestion; it seems that with my 90 posts this approach is easier than me trying to figure out how to modify the page template (i'm technical but not a programmer per se). Since this approach consolidates my other categories into essentially one, do I use Tags to classify posts the way I present use categories? I do not use tags now. woops...just re-reading your instructions, maybe the other categories don't matter since I'm telling Genesis to just show "blog" posts?
And in terms of specifying the number of posts to display per page, would it be true that that specification would apply to both the "blog" and the "books" categories? (I cannot define them differently.)
You won't roll all your categories into "blog". You can keep posts in multiple categories, and you can display the non-blog, non-book categories with a category archive link, just like your book category. If you specify some Archive Headline and Archive Intro Text (edit the category to see), that headline and text will appear above your category archive, so you'll have some differentiation between categories.
For the # of blog posts, you can have whatever you want - all it takes is time & money 🙂 If you want the simple route, then no, you can't have different #'s of posts between categories. If you invest just a little bit of time, you can have category templates that present each category differently, with different #'s of posts. For example, I have a category template that just lists the post title as a link, but displays 100 of them. It's a handy template for a news or press release category that might have a lot of posts. If you like the approach and are a little more specific about what you want, I can see if any of my pre-built templates might fit the need.
On tags, it's great to use them to encourage people to explore your site. If someone is searching for a term using the search tools on your site, they'll find the content without a tag if the tag is in the post content. Tags aren't really designed to lead people to something they know they are looking for; instead, they're a hint to someone who may not be aware that he wants to look for a particular tag, where the hint is seeing the tag in your tag cloud. If you tag your content in a consistent way and the tags are inviting, you'll find visitors using tags to find things they weren't sure they were interested in. You should have a relatively small # of categories, and your # of tags can be more than the # of categories, but still a not huge #. I redid a site that had 2000 tags, and that was a crazy #.
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In the theme settings near the bottom there is a place to exclude categories from the blog, which I have found extremely helpful when setting up sites with just this type of thing in mind. To find the category ID go into your categories and run the cursor over the category names while looking at the bottom left corner of your browser. You will see the category ID there. It is by far the simplest solution to my mind.
Good observation, Alirat. If someone only wants to change which categories are displayed for the blog layout but doesn't want to change what is displayed, your suggestion is the best approach.
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Thanks Alirat, I had never noticed that setting before. In this case though I want to show a "book" category, but keep those posts segregated from all the others. I don't want to suppress categories. In terms of layout design, this is an example of one approach I like: http://www.telemachuspress.com/AuthorCatalog.aspx
Now, I don't have to have it as fancy as this which looks to be database driven. I envision the post title being a book name and author, and the post basically a paragraph and image. Bill, to your point about tags I might use genres (thanks for the primer on tags, btw, much clearer now).
I'm not sure if i shared my site but it is sellbox.com. I'd probably re-work the menu bar to show 'Client Library' or some such descriptor that links to these Book posts. I think for now my blog style works and I frankly could get by with a single category and lots of tags. Then have one category for Books. Let me know if that makes sense or you still think one or more category templates is easy to pull off. Thanks.
@dwogahn - You said "I don’t want to suppress categories" in your most recent post, but you also said "I don’t want to intermix them with my regular blog posts" - those 2 statements contradict. Alirat's suggestion is an easy way to not "intermix" the Books category from your other categories without a) having to create a separate Blog category and reassigning all posts and b) getting into custom templates.
You also said "I frankly could get by with a single category and lots of tags. Then have one category for Books." Technically, that's 2 categories 🙂 I'm guessing the "single category" you referred to was my suggestion to add a separate "Blog" category. If you don't need the other categories AND if you have not allowed search engines to index your category archives AND if no one has linked to a category archive, you could consolidate down to 2 categories: Blog and Books. I raise the other points because if you drop archives, those links will now 404, so you'd need to redirect them.
Right now, you have 17 categories, which to me is too many. I'd drop the uncategorized (remove any posts assigned to it and then delete it). For the others... Your category archives are set to noindex, which is good. However, if things have changed, Google may have already indexed an archive, which will 404 once you revise things, so you should monitor the 404 errors you get and act appropriately. You can consolidate the 16 remaining categories to as few as 2 (Books, Blog) and use tags. If you are going to effectively stop using categories as a way to show organization to a visitor, I would modify your display of "post meta" to not display category info. Search on how to do this (plenty of tips or posts here). And you'd drop the category list in your sidebar and replace it with a tag cloud.
I'd also get a custom favicon, and customize the footer links while you're spending time on your site.
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Acknowledging my misunderstanding and mixed up response. I've now accomplished several of the items (favicon, footer, post meta...and other housekeeping...thanks for that). I still need to consolidate categories, implement tags; will do. I tried to find the place to exclude categories (thanks Alirat) but it isn't there on Education. But poking around the tutorials I found "How to Create a Category Blog Page" instructions which seems like a solution for my "books" category without impacting my "blog". Would this work in my case? (http://my.studiopress.com/tutorials/category-blog-page/).
It should be there under Genesis->Theme Settings in the meta box Blog Page Template.
No worries on acknowledging. I just wanted to be clear on what you wanted so any advice I offered was relevant.
You don't need to go that trouble. Just add the category and a link to the category in the menu.
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Apparently this was left out of the Education theme design. I also had to use Simple Hooks to add my Analytics code b/c I have no access to header/footer scripts in my theme settings. Here is a list of settings I can control:
Information, Color Style, Default Layout, Nav Settings, Comments and Trackbacks. That's it! I'm using Version: 1.8.2 · Released: June 20, 2012.
I also have the eleven40 installed for another site. All these controls are present in that theme.
I've emailed support.These two tutorials should help you a lot: Effective Use of the Genesis Blog Template & Effective Use of the Blog Template Part 2.
Doh. I found the Screen Options pull down to display my missing page elements. Thanks wpsmith. I never touched this in the other theme so I didn't think about it. Glad it was simple. Thanks for the tutorials too.
I created a category and added several posts.
http://www.sellbox.com/category/project-gallery/A few questions:
Is there a way to make time/author/comments different by category? Or does that involve one of the solutions we discussed in this thread?
Looks like I cannot exclude categories from the Post Categories widget. Is that true?
Can I add a preface to a category? Text that explains what the reader will find when looking at entries in this category.
Those are a variety of questions that belong in different places. But let me answer them for you...
Is there a way to make time/author/comments different by category? Or does that involve one of the solutions we discussed in this thread?
Yes, there is. You will want to use conditional tags via functions.php if Genesis Simple Edits does not work for you.
Looks like I cannot exclude categories from the Post Categories widget. Is that true?
If you mean the categories widget, out of the box via the widget GUI, you cannot. However, you can via functions.php.
add_filter( 'widget_categories_dropdown_args', 'wps_exclude_widget_categories' );
/**
* Exclude widget categories from widget dropdown.
*/
function wps_exclude_widget_categories( $args ) {
$args['exclude'] = '3,6,18'; // The IDs of the excluding categories
return $args;
}
Can I add a preface to a category? Text that explains what the reader will find when looking at entries in this category.
This is already built into Genesis. Go to the Category inside WordPress and edit the category. Then add introduction content or a custom headline.
Thanks wpsmith. I was able to follow these instructions.
In Theme Settings I can choose between "Display post excerpts" OR "Display post content". Is there a way to assign this option by category? i.e. I'd like only one category to "Display post content" and all other categories to "Display post excerpts".
The answer to your question goes back to some of my earlier comments. You can do what you want, but it will take a little more effort.
With the standard options, you cannot have a different archive setting by category. With the standard options, all archives follow the setting for content/excerpt. However, in WP, you can create templates, and you can control the display and styling of every category individually with a category template. See the WP codex on category templates. As wpsmith observed, some of the elements of category templates are available to you in other ways, such as the title and category description, which you can control on a category by category basis. But unfortunately, control of post content vs excerpts only comes from a category template.
A category template is a very small file that you'd put in your child theme folder. Google (or just search here) to locate some examples that might suit your needs, and we can suggest ways to fine tune those templates for you. I have a number of them already, but without a better sense of what you want in a category template, they wouldn't get you closer to where you want to go.
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If you only want one category that you'd like to display all content, I would set the setting for excerpts. Then in functions.php, I would write up some code to display the full content of the other category. However, just as Bill noted, without knowing further where and when you'd like to do this, we cannot give you the best code.
I read through the relevant codex (thanks Bill) which helped me understand your suggestion better wpsmith. I also poked around the discussion boards before coming up with what I hope is a clearer idea of what I'm after.
I want to display all categories EXCEPT one category (my #35) as post excerpt. Right now I have the image default as 300x300 and I can leave it that way.
The exception category is my #35. As I understand it this would be a new category template. Here is the look and behavior I'd like to achieve:No date, no author, no comments
300x300 image
Text from full post
I currently show social media tools below each post. I'd like to continue to offer this, if possible.
The post can link to the "full post" although it would look exactly the same.
I'd like to have Category header text. I prefer to show text at the top of the category on the first page only, if possible.Do one of you have something like this you can share? Or some specific direction? Or compromises that get me close? Thanks in advance.
See http://wpp.im/a.
To exclude 1 category from your blog archive, see the info in this thread. Adjust your blog archive for your desired outcome.
For your category template for category with an ID of 35, put the code in the template in a file named category-35.php
The template displays 5 full posts, but you can adjust that. As for comments, they don't display in an archive. If you don't want to allow visitors to comment on a post in this category, you can manually turn that off on the post edit screen.
That should be pretty close to what you described. Hope it helps.
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