Organizing site into multiple sections

  • DaveDel

    (@davedel)


    11 years, 4 months ago

    Hi,

    I’m in the process of putting together my first WordPress site. I have experience using the Plone and dotCMS content management systems, and I’m having a little trouble figuring out the WP way of doing things. Please forgive me if I get the terminology wrong, I’m just starting out. Any help will be appreciated!

    I’m working on a simple site for a local community arts commission. The main landing page will be an introduction to the commission and recent news. In addition there will be a few other top-level pages for news, ‘about us’, sitemap, etc. I think I know how to do all of this.

    In addition to the main organization’s content I want to have sections on the site for the major events that the commission puts on. So I’ll have a landing page for:

    • Art Festival
    • Film Festival
    • Theater Camp

    Each section will have a set of related pages – history, rules, contacts, registration docs and similar content. I’d like these sections to have a news page and sidebar widget that only shows posts related to the section they’re in. I’m having trouble figuring out how to organize this content into sections.

    What’s the best way to go about this in WordPress? I’m looking at multisite, but that feels like a pretty big hammer for a site that will be a total of 20 pages – plus I’d like all blog postings to appear on the main news page.

    Thanks!

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  • linux4me2

    (@linux4me2)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    The thing about WordPress is that there is usually more than one way to do things. This is just one way. I think that almost all you need to know is contained in the Pages page of the Codex.

    1. Create a child theme based on your current theme so that any changes are not overwritten if/when you upgrade your theme.
    2. Set up a category called “News” (Posts -> Categories)
    3. Set up a custom template to display a page of posts limited to the “News” category. Call it “Home Template” or something similar. The example I linked to uses two categories, but you can alter the code to use just the News category you created if you change the category slugs they used. If you’re not using the Twenty Eleven theme, you’ll need to adapt the code in page.php for your theme.
    4. Create a page called “Home” (Pages -> Add New) and set it to use the custom “Home Template” you just created so that it displays only the posts from News.
    5. After your “Home” page is set up, set your blog to use it as the home page (Settings -> Front Page Displays, A Static Page, Front Page, and select “Home.”

    For the rest of your pages, you’ll be creating Pages for each section with accompanying subpages something like this:

    • Art Festival
    • History
    • Rules
    • Contacts
    • Registration

    And you’ll probably want to create a custom template somewhat like you did for the Home page for each major section to display the specific news categories for each along with any other static content.

    That’s a quick-and-dirty overview, and as I said, most of the information you need to do this is in the Pages Codex page.

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