Michael Bishop

If you are using wp_list_cats set the sort_column to name, ie, <?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); />

If you are using list_cats read through the docs on it Template_Tags/list_cats

Other than using the optional excerpt, I’m not familiar with a way to guarantee the first sentence. You can use the plugin, excerpt_reloaded to customize the length in characters of the excerpt however.

The install did run?

Can you get to your admin panel?

make sure the default theme is selected.

I think using the < is what’s breaking it. When looking at your page source it’s outputting <by Lauren>, try changing it to ( ) and see if that works.

If so, we can find a solution to using the < > if you really want them.

Empty, not drop.

NananaNanana – – – Bat Behavior…. (Ok, that was bad :P)

You’ll need to do it manually via the Database.

And as Handy mentioned, make sure you are running the latest version, as it is much better at purging old logs.

The best answer is to simply wait until mid January for WP 2.1, this feature is built in. You will be able to create a Page called Home, and use that as the main page, and then create a Page called Blog, and assign that as your posts page. Home will use the default page template unless you create a special template for it.

There are options for doing such, but it’s not pretty, and the permalink isn’t the same as the rest of the site.

With help, I created a function that I added to a functions.php file for a theme ( a plugin would also do this, but I was lazy).
<?php
add_action('init', 'ir_init');
function ir_init() {
if (!empty($_GET['blog'])) {
add_action('template_redirect', 'ir_includeIndex');
}
}
function ir_includeIndex() {
load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . '/index.php');
exit;
}
?>
Then in my theme I added:
<ul><?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ?>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('siteurl'); ?>/index.php/?blog=1">Blog</a></li></ul>

The original goal for this was to have a home.php that had one output of the blog, and the index.php a second.

Basically home.php had excerpts, no sidebar, and a big footer, Blog was the traditional full content, sidebar look.

I’ve not used this code in over 6 months, so there’s no guarantee that it still works. As I said, I’d wait for 2.1