categories to "pages" on wordpress.com

this comes from “Posts on pages” « wordpress tips

“Posts on pages”

June 30, 2010 — Panos

Users sometimes ask how they can make some posts appear on a page they create.

This question springs from a confusion between two different kinds of “pages”. Your main posts pages, or the pages that show up if you click certain items in your sidebar (categories, monthly archives e.o.) are dynamic pages: they display a number of posts, they are created on the fly, and you cannot edit them. The editable pages you create under Pages > Add New are staticpages: similar to posts, only outside the chronological structure of the blog.

So, taken literally, the question doesn’t make sense. A static page is like a post – like one post: asking if you can display “posts on a page” you have created is just like asking if you can display posts on a post.

What some users actually have in mind when they ask this question is how to arrange their posts into various groups. That’s the job of post categories, not pages. Just assign appropriate categories to your posts, and add the Categories widget to your sidebar or bottombar: clicking on a category in the widget will bring up the posts filed under that category.

Other users are quite familiar with the concept of post categories; what theyactually have in mind is how to make the top navigation menu (header tabs) link to category pages instead of static pages.

To do that, you need to select a suitable theme:

1. Enterprise, Motion, and Titan have two header menus: pages andcategories. In Titan, the page menu can be deactivated (Appearance > Theme options).

2. In iNove and Monochrome the header menu can be pages or categories (Appearance > Theme Options).

3. In all themes with header tabs (complete list here) you can use the new Custom Menu feature – see Support doc on Menus.

4. In Under the Influence you can add “Extra Links” (Appearance > Theme Options). [*]

5. In some themes you can use a similar workaround – see my post Page tabs as extra links. [*]

(6. There’s also the possibility shown in this post; would work in the first two groups of themes listed here. If you aren’t very experienced in HTML, forget it.)

[*] To create the link to a category page in cases 4 and 5, you must first click that category in your sidebar or bottombar and copy its URL from the address bar of your browser.

Lastly, some users ask if they can make their blog front display or exclude one particular category of posts. The answer to that is no: your blog front displays your latest posts, regardless of category. You can limit their number (Settings > Reading), including no posts at all if you set your front to display a static page, but you cannot pick by category.

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