If I get you correctly:
Pages>All Pages
I think you have two pages with the same name, that’s why the alias (news-2) made automatically.
The other page (previous one) may be in the list of All Posts or in trash.
Remove one to rename the alias to “news”.
Thanks for getting back !
No there is only one news page ( in fact I only have two pages – my static home page and my news page)
But I went back to beta-1 and it has the normal drop down selection, but this has changed in beta-2 (or possibly since!), it is now a free form field which is titled, ‘page title’ – but I updated another occurrence of beta-1 that already had the blog page configured to news and retained the settings, so I can move on – but something odd here !
Dave
Yeah, that’s definitely a change!
-I’m guessing it’s to help newer folks by simply creating a page at the time the settings are changed?
It doesn’t seem to work for me. I get an “You must select a page to set a static front page.” notification, even though the verbiage makes it sound like it’s going to create a new page with that name, for me.
Also it seems like this should be a drop-down, or at least auto-suggest based on the actual page titles. It doesn’t (Chrome – latest stable) for me. So you better make sure you get the title right, or they should consider this a bug and fix it.
I tried a random word ‘cheese’ in this case. Everything saved, no indication of any problem.
but domain.com/cheese is a non existent URL, so it wasn’t generated, yet I got no indication of a problem.
So yeah, I would agree a little clarity might be needed there or a different selection mechanism, or something. Seems a strange / confusing setup now.