Categories, Pages, and Posts; help with organization

  • Working on my first non-blog wordpress site, primarily to use wp as a cms.

    After spending the last few hours trying to figure out how to organize the content, I’m a bit stumped.

    I want the organizational abilities of categories and subcats, but the hierarchal-ness of pages with subpages, along with the ability to loop within the subpages of a current page thus displaying subpages similar to posts ( title link, excerpt, author, etc ).

    Obviously I can’t do all 3 things, but it seems each has a benefit I would like to keep.

    Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish:

    I. Laptops
    A. Hardware
         1. motherboard guide
         2. video card guide
         3...
    B. Software
         1. operating system guide
         2. optimization guide
         3...
II. Desktops
    A. Hardware
         1. motherboard guide
         2. video card guide
         3...
    B. Software
         1. operating system guide
         2. optimization guide
         3...
III. Mobile
    A. Hardware
         1. motherboard guide
         2. video card guide
         3...
    B. Software
         1. operating system guide
         2. optimization guide
         3...

    I’ve tried making all the guides as posts and organizing into categories, but I ran into a problem where I couldn’t get down two levels of child_of. Also cannot name the categories the same when they are children of parent categories, and the redundancy step of naming the category with the parent name seemed absurd.

    I tried using pages for my organization, but ran into problems showing the sub-pages AS posts ( header, exceprt, author etc ). This solution would work beautifuly if I could simply execute the loop to pages as if they were posts. Something like

    <?php while (have_pages()) : the_page(); ?>

    would be ideal really. Then I could just push through each page and display it’s subpages. Although I might run into a problem when I get to the end, since page.php will be the template and it displays just the child pages, not the full content of a page…

    I also tried to make the pages display post categories based on which page you were on, but that gets incredibly messy after more than 3 main groups are added, especially if i want to do I. and A. B. C. etc.

    Am I thinking about this wrong? I just want a two tier hierarchical structure. And when you click into the first tier I want to display ALL the content beneath it as posts, with a subnav to go one tier further.

    It seems so easy until I went in to build it. And I’m likely confusing the difference between posts, pages, and categories which is just frustrating me more.

    Is there a simpler solution ?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter tehfailsafe

    (@tehfailsafe)

    Anyone? I really don’t want to just set the limit at 1 tier of organization using categories without subcats…

    I have to some point the same need/wish:
    I want to have a page that lists subpages showing title, excerpt and a read-more link.
    I do not want the page to be a category, but just a page listing its subpages just like a normal category except it ′s a page…

    I don’t get it, do you mean you want to create Categories and Subcategories but they have to look like pages?

    No Stevenoi, I want to have a page, and this page lists it′s subpages.

    Another solution I could want is to have a category (level=1) that lists all pages in that category (level=2). I would want the level=1-page to list the level=2-pages with title, excerpt and a read more-link.

    Any tips?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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