Total newbie to WP…please help with applying categories to MULTIPLE pages

Pages don’t have categories.
Maybe you should revise the organization of your content. Or, at least, try to explain it clearly – somebody might be able to help you.

If by “pages of categories” you mean category archives where posts in a certain category are listed – they are created automatically by WP; just start posting in those categories.

Unfortunately in your case that would mean creating hundreds (thousands?) of categories – if you want to have a category for every college/institution. That’s the part I see as quite difficult to manage. According to some earlier reports a WP install having many hundreds or thousands categories tend to choke…
Plus, re-reading your plan: it would also mean thousands of authors…

Moshu keeps saying that pages don’t have categories, this is untrue, they are assigned to the default category normally but you can easily reassign them if you add the following lines to your wp-admin/edit-page-form.php file in the right place:

<fieldset id=”categorydiv” class=”dbx-box”>
<h3 class=”dbx-handle”><?php _e(‘Categories’) ?></h3>
<div class=”dbx-content”>
<p id=”jaxcat”>
<div id=”categorychecklist”><?php dropdown_categories(get_settings(‘default_category’)); ?></div></div>
</fieldset>

This will give you the option of assigning the category of each individual page you create or edit it as you see fit. I’m not sure why the wp team hasn’t added this functionallity by default into wordpress. I think older versions of wp treated pages differently but now they’re basically posts.

First off I’m not sure you want to use “pages” for this exercise… because pages are outside the main wp loop. However one thing I did on my site is to use the page architecture, basically assing a page for each state and for each school in that state you can parent it to the state page. I’ll show you a quick example, this is just a quick idea about what you’re trying to do and it may not work for you at all anyways.

http://e7.shanky.com/wordpress/?page_id=38

Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the site map, you’ll notice how the Art Gallery functions as a parent for all the individual sub-pages.

Your question really is a web design question, not so much wp related.

I was just browsing through your site, I didn’t see the error at all. Looks like you have a good start going. One thing you should consider is making a category for each state. This is a pretty big project you have started.

I think you have to create one by one, but look, there’s only so many states 🙂

I just tried the code, but I don’t think it works. You can assign a page to a category, but you can’t see it anywhere. In the Manage Page section you can’t see which pages belong to which categories.