dlvonde

alchymyth,

thanks for taking the time to respond and asking the right questions :).
As you probably gathered my fundamental understanding of how WordPress works is perhaps not in line with reality :).

To answer your questions:
– All of my pages currently point to the “standard” page template. It sounds like I need to make a custom .php file for each page and associate the page with that file. I’ll go through the document you sent to try and create custom template pages if that’s really the most efficient way of doing it.

– Nope, didn’t know where to put the queries..was thinking I could just stick some shortcode in the vanilla static page since that would be a lot simpler than creating multiple php templates but if this is the way to go then I’ve got a lot more work to do and figure out.

– Thanks for the queries syntax..I suppose I paste the WP_Query with the appropriate arguments before the loop in my custom template page, then figure out how to associate my page with that template php file.

I guess I was thinking the data is sitting in a database and it would be a lot simpler to just pull it out after a couple where clauses just like you would query a sql database without having to make a bunch of custom pages and add a bunch of extra php.

currently my site has nothing but static pages all pointing to whatever the default page template is, so theres really nothing to see..I toyed around with making a function and creating a shortcode for it..I thought I could make a function that I could pass the category_name and year to then create a shortcode like [getmyposts catname=’blah’ year=’2010′]

But I’ll try the custom pages and see how that works out…is it really necessary to make a custom page template for each and every page? surely I can pass arguments to it such as year..then I could have a single php file with static content up top and dynamic content based on the year below.

correction..not just a custom table but a custom SEARCHABLE table. I found a plugin called WP-Table that seems to do the custom table part and something called Search Unleashed that will search the table IF I add some php file with some addtional code in it. Is there a better way? And for some reason I’m not able to edit my posts..otherwise I wouldn’t keep typing new ones.

OK, poking around it looks like there isn’t much of a difference between archive and categories..it’s basically just a “category” of time instead of the categories I defined, correct? So basically I can create a page, call it “archives”, then point to categories and filter..or use a plugin like Smart Archives to do it for me. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to do this or if I need some plugin..basically I want a static page so I can put some stuff at the top, then call a filter after my static stuff is done to list posts/other items/etc. So far if I create category filters and set them up as menu items of course it just shows the posts with no static info on top.

This will be a website for a church and I found the awesome Sermon Browser plugin which appears to create a database with pre-defined fields allowing you to plug in the pertinent information and add audio/video/powerpoint slides. This is great! This solves my issue of being able to create a static page with stuff on top, then call the shortcode [sermons <filter parameters>]

I’d like to find another plugin however for listing bulletins in the same manner, but need to customize the fields a bit…Can anyone recommend a plugin for that? Again, I’m trying to make this as simple to update/maintain as possible. I really like the idea of setting it up once, then just sticking short code in a page with a couple filters/parameters..or even like the Sermon Browser does where it allows the user to select the filter criteria.