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Widget Problems

  1. jonpais
    Inactive

    A long while back, I wrote that I had a problem trying to consolidate all my movie reviews in a widget. Right now, they are all over the place at the top and again at the bottom of the blog. It looks like a mess! I was told to go to "appearance" and make a custom menu, which I did. Then, I checked all the movie review pages and hit "create" or "save". Anyhow, I go back to see what's happened, and nothing's changed. I just want a widget saying "movie reviews" on the main page, and when you click on it, you are taken to another page with a list of my reviews in alphabetical order. When the reader clicks on the title of a particular review, he is taken to the page with the review on it. Why is that so hard to do?

    The blog I need help with is jonpais.wordpress.com.

  2. justpi
    Member

    You should have published all the reviews as posts instead of pages, and assign a "Reviews" category to all of them. Then you'd simply create a custom menu that would include the Reviews category.

    If you don't want to do this, you need to create a new page, add links to all your reviews on it, then add that page to your menu.

    In both cases you need to set that custom menu as your top menu, so that your top menu won't display each single page like it does now.

    More detailed instructions here:
    http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/custom-menus/

  3. jonpais
    Inactive

    Okay, Justpi.

    You say there are just three steps 1) publish reviews as posts, not pages; 2) assign a "reviews" category to them; 3) then create a custom menu...

    There are only around twenty reviews, so why don't I just go ahead and copy each one, republish as a post instead of a page, and delete the original? Okay, Step One complete...

    Now, how do I "assign a Reviews category" to them?

  4. justpi
    Member

    This way:
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories/#adding-categories-with-the-categories-module

    Note on turning the pages to posts: Since their content includes images, videos and some formatting such as bold text etc., copypaste from the HTML page editor to the HTML post editor. And, naturally, you'll do that faster if you use two browser windows simultaneously.

  5. jonpais
    Inactive

    Okay, Justpi.... I went ahead and copied and pasted all my Pages into Posts. I categorized all the reviews as "Movie Reviews" and created a menu "Movie Reviews". I selected all the movie reviews and they appeared under the menu button. I then went ahead and dragged and dropped them in the correct order and hit "save". Oh, and I chose to save them as the primary under the theme thingamabob...

    So, now, ALL my movies appear on one long page, and the header was cluttered with the names of the films. I removed the menu as primary, and the clutter disappeared, but I still have one long page with 25 movie reviews.

    You know the Recent Posts on the right hand side of the page... maybe I can just have a movie review thing there. If the words were small, I wouldn't mind having them on the right... Or not possible with my Theme?

    Or, if I could just have Movie Reviews appear on the banner, along with Home and About Me, without all the names cluttering everything....

  6. justpi
    Member

    Or, if I could just have Movie Reviews appear on the banner, along with Home and About Me, without all the names cluttering everything....

    That's what I originally suggested. You don't create a "Movie Reviews" menu, you create a "Top Menu", add Home and About from the Pages Module, add Movie Reviews from the Categories module, save menu, select that menu from the Theme Locations pulldown, save. Study the post I have already linked to:
    http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/custom-menus/

  7. jonpais
    Inactive

    Okay, I did that. Now, I have one endless front page with some 30 posts, with movie reviews in reverse alphabetical order, and when I click on "Movie Reviews" in the header, I get another endless page of reviews I categorized as Movie Reviews. How can I remove all the reviews from the front page, and when I click Movie Reviews, just see the titles of the films. Then, when I click on the title, I can see the movie. Or, how can I just put Movie Reviews in the sidebar, and readers can click on the title to read the review....

  8. justpi
    Member

    1) You have an endless front page because of a recently introduced strange feature called "infinite scrolling". Go to Appearance > Widgets, add an empty text widget to one of the footer areas, then go to Settings > Reading, set the number of posts per page you'd like, disable the infinite scrolling option, click Save Changes.

    2) The front page displays your latest posts (number of posts displayed set as explained above). You can't selectively remove some posts from the front page. If you don't want those posts on the front page, the only alternative is no posts at all: you'd need to create an intro page in Pages > Add New and set that page as your front in Settings > Reading.

    3) In the theme you're using, a category page can't be made to display only titles. You'd need to switch to a different theme, or arrange all things differently again. So first see if solutions 1 or 2 are ok with you.

  9. jonpais
    Inactive

    thanks so much! I think I finally got it to look sort of how I want, at least for now - no more infinite scrolling, I've got one movie review per page, the reviews aren't cluttering up top and bottom of page...

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