More WordPress foibles May 11, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress , trackbackThis is a post ostensibly about “WordPress Foibles” which, on reading it just before posting I suspect may be more about “Andy Roberts Foibles” than anything else. If you don’t enjoy messing about with WordPress then it might not be at all helpful, but if y0u do, then you probably already know this stuff. Anyway I started so I’ll finish….
I was making some changes to a WordPress self-hosted blog recently, a modification which ought to be quite straightforward to implement once the design is decided, but I temporarily got myself into a bit of a pickle. I’ll document it now for future reference. You see, I like to use themes that present horizontal navigation tabs, which in WordPress tend to be created automatically by some skins, according to the presence of pages in the WordPress content structure.
WordPress Pages and Page Tabs
But sometimes I might need to have a page that doesn’t show up on the navigation.
Or I might want to have a navigation tab that leads to somewhere that isn’t a page.
So I bodge it a little by using redirection for the latter and “Invisibility” for the former. Invisibility used to be an option for pages I think in previous versions but these days the “Post Status” options are “draft” “published” and “private”. Private works the same way as invisible, so that a page can function perfectly well on the public face but without being listed under “Pages” and without making a visible tab for the page in the header. There’s a bit more to this because pages can also have a parent page, and only a very few themes make use of a hierarchical page structure to show nested pages as dynamic navigation lists, and those I tried out failed to do so effectively. So I have a page called “invisible parent” to which other pages can belong.
The Problem
My problem occurred when I need make a change to the settings in Options / Reading. That’s where you can set the Front page to be static rather than the blog, and also where you then have to designate a nominal page to act as a container for the actual blog part. I changed the blog part from being on the “news” page to a new one I’d created called “blog” and saved the option. The blog part worked fine, but later I realized that my static front page had disappeared. It was displaying the blog as well. For a while I was nonplussed. Not only couldn’t I understand what was happening but it also seemed for a minute that the old static frontpage content had completely vanished. Panic!
The Explanation
In the end I discovered that the drop down selection for the location of the static page had reverted to “- Select -”. And I rediscovered my content hiding in a page which I’d created ages ago called “about”. So all I needed to do was to select the “about” page from the drop menu, right? But that page didn’t appear as an option. Oh no! Why isn’t it there? Because I’d made it belong to an invisible parent Doh.
the Solution
*Make the invisible parent temporarily visible, so that the offspring appear as options for selection in
Options / Reading Front Page displays: a static page - select -
*Select the page from the now complete list
*Update Options
*Make the parent invisible again.
So what?
In documenting this process I’ve learned a couple of lessons, or at least made them more explicit. One is that I still sometimes miss real programming languages and get frustrated by having to find workarounds when restricted by others fixed logic. The other is to rediscover a problem solving technique which involves taking something apart a little, in order to set it up better when its put back together again. Like solving a rubik cube, when you have it 95% completed sometimes you have to undo a couple of layers right back to 60% before getting everything in place to reach the 100% solution.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
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