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Managing Page Order
This How To shows you how to change the displayed order of pages and posts ( including events, resources and books ) .
Terms:
There are a couple of terms we need to define before we start:
- Front End – Web Pages visitors see when visiting your web site.
- Back End – The Dashboard / Control Panel that logged in users might see. What is visible in the Dashboard varies depending on a user’s permissions
- Page / Post – A page or post is a single item in your WordPress site. It shows as a web page on the front end. The differences between posts and pages are:
- Pages are normally a one off item, something that appears only once on your site. Examples include Home Page,Contact Us Page, About Us Page, Terms and Conditions Page. you normally don’t have more than one of these pages.
- Posts are a type of web page that has more than one of them. Examples are: News letter posts, Books, Events, Resources. You have more than one book post, more than one event posts and more than one resources post.
- Posts are grouped in Categories. A category is a taxonomy / hierarchy describing the organization of your posts. For example, Book Categories include: Self Help, Kids Books, Study Guides, Islam etc.
- Pages are not grouped in categories, as there is usually only one page of a certain type. However pages may have parents. you might have a Summary About Us Page with
Our History, Our Doctrine and Our Kaupapa as sub pages. Each of these pages is a single item ( you don’t have two Kaupapa, two histories etc ) but it can make sense to store them in a Parent / Child hierarchy to make navigating to them more logical.
- Categories – Are a taxonomy describing how posts are catalogued. Categories may also be called ‘Archives’, as they are a catalogue of previous posts.
- Posts may be in more than one category. For example a Self Help Picture book about trusting God in Earthquakes may be categorized as a self-help book and also as a children’s’ book.
- Categories may have sub categories so clicking on the parent category might bring up all posts in the sub categories of the parent category.
- Categories are visible on the front end of the website. They will display a collection of posts that belong to the category the page is displaying. They are a summary web page showing post information and inviting the user to click on the individual post and see more.
What Can You Edit:
Editing Pages And Posts
- When you are logged into the website, and are viewing a single page or single post on the front end, you may see a link allowing you to edit that page or post. You will only see that link if you are :
- An editor level or above user (Can edit and modify others posts / pages)
- The author of the page or post
- When you are logged into the website and are viewing a Category Page (Books, Events, Resources, Staff) you cannot edit that page as it is a category, ie a summation of the posts of a certain category. You can however click on the individual post and edit that
Changing the order of Posts and Pages
- Sometimes when you are viewing a category, the posts are not displayed in the order you want to see them in. Every category is ordered by either creation date, title, author name, modified date or some other attribute.
- You don’t want to change the attribute to display the posts in a different order so we have added a feature that lets you drag the posts and pages into a different order. To do this you need to be logged into the Dashboard. The instructions for what to do next are below.
How to change Post and Page Order:
- Log into the Dashboard
- Go to the posts or pages you wish to reorder ( we will use books as our example)
- Hover your mouse over a part of the listing that is blank. You should see a cross shape come up
- Left click and drag the post to its new location
- Release the left click when it is in its new location
- Refresh the front end category page to see the changes
Here is a visual step by step with diagrams to help you.
NB:
There are also taxonomies in WordPress called Tags. you can add tags to posts and pages. Basically these are meaningful words and phrases people might search for to see information. As an example you might tag an event as Annual so people can see annual events or you might tag a book as Easy Reading. Tags are not hierarchical – they are more of a cloud of ideas rather than a structured taxonomy.
Tags work a little bit like categories but putting things in order for them may be less easy than categories.