Michael Bishop

First, if you are using version 2.7.1 of WordPress, you should seriously consider upgrading. That is very old and certainly a security risk.

Second, there’s no fool proof way to display the actual pdf “in the page”. That is browser dependent. One option would be to make a .jpg of the .pdf, and upload that as well. Then make the .jpg *link* to the .pdf.

Your template is probably using the_excerpt, which strips any html, including images.

Two options off the top of my head. Modify the_excerpt in your functions.php file to include the img tag, or better, would be to utilize the featured image option and modify the category template to use a thumbnail of the featured image.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Thumbnails

To modify the excerpt function to include img tags (which still would only show if at the beginning of the post)

// allow certain tags in excerpt
function excerpt_nostrip($text) {

	return strip_tags($text, '<img>');
}
add_filter('get_the_excerpt','excerpt_nostrip');

I heard good things about the Vanilla session at WordCamp Miami and it’s integration with WordPress. BBPress is what runs this forum and integrates with WordPress (obviously) but is going through some changes as to whether it will be a plugin or stand alone install. Worth investigating both I’d say.

That is set via Settings->Permalinks. Any of the non-default permalink structures will give you pages with the page name instead of the ID.

If you don’t want your blog posts to show on the home page, you need to create a page that you do want to display there, then under Settings->Reading-Front Page Displays: a static page, and then select the page you created that you want to display there from the dropdown.

Check your theme’s header file, or possibly in functions.php. Somewhere there’s a conditional is_page for the meta title tag being set to only show the page title.

Conversely, you can use one of the “SEO” plugins that gives you more granular control over your meta title from the admin, without having to edit any theme files.

If they are not published, you won’t be able to link to them.

I wasn’t able to replicate the problem. Do you have any plugins running that have added additional meta boxes to your write post screen? Any plugins that are category related?

Also, what browser did you experience this with?