dcochran

Yes! That’s the kind of stuff I’m needing. Thank you. I’ll dig around, try it out, and report back.

Otto42,
I understand what you’ve suggested. I’ve read all about pages, I’ve created new page templates, and I have selected these templates for new WordPress Pages.

What these pages will not do is pull posts from multiple categories into the same page. This is what I want to be able to do.

I know WordPress does not typically do this. I want to know if there is a way to make WordPress do this. Apparently I’ve got to do some hacking. How do I hack it and where?

As for what kind of loops I am using — they are loops which begin like this.

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
		<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php if (in_category('5') ): ?>

Each one is set to pull posts from a specific category. I have several of these loops running in the index.php, each with a different category number, and together they populate my homepage with multiple posts from multiple categories, each in its own section of the homepage.

Now I want other pages, besides just the homepage, which also enable me to fill out the page with various sections, each section populated by posts from a different category. Thus, these other pages will, like my index, contain multiple posts coming from multiple categories. I am assuming these can’t be WordPress Pages, and they can’t be category archives — or if they can be, then I have to modify the way WordPress works.

Where do I modify, and how?

Thanks to all for jumping back in here with me.

To try to make it more specific:

My current index.php places posts of category sub-features within a sub-features div which I position in the top left sidebar. Under that I have a loop pulling posts of category announcements. Then I have a loop pulling posts of category features, which I’ve positioned at the top of the center column. Under features is a loop pulling posts from the category Homepage Highlights … and on it goes.

Now I want MORE such files, in which I pull posts from multiple categories and place them in various places on the same web page. I do not need to create these as WordPress pages. I only want to be able to make a copy of index.php and change up the categories of the posts which get pulled in by the various loops.

Besides index.php, I would like to have campus-life.php that does this, and academics.php, and eventually more. Each of these would have a complex layout, like my current index.php — placing posts from various categories in various places on the web page.

I’ve tried this, but the loops don’t work. And when I place the file in the theme folder, the URL goes to the file in the theme folder (which is extraordinarily long and awkward), and the loops still don’t work.

Is there a way to tell wordpress to treat these new multi-category template files like it treats index.php? — connecting it to an address on the main site structure (i.e., http://okwueagle.com/campus-life.php) — and allowing it to pull posts from multiple categories into various places in the same page?

By the way, there is no 404 page working yet (I’m working on that), and so when you go to a page that isn’t there, you get the index:

http://okwueagle.com/

Just checking back — Is there a way to do this?

It works great! Thanks.