Putting Blog Elsewhere

Howdy Rich,
Not certain I understand your question, but I’ll give it a shot.

Your blog page, really, is just a category archive page — listing the posts in a particular category. So, you could do something like this:

1. Add a “Blog” category to your site (or call it whatever…)
2. Add a post or two and put them in the “Blog” category.
3. Add the “Blog” category link to your site’s navigation menu. (That is assuming that Appearance > Menus is available to you and the theme supports built-in menus.)

Give that a shot and let me know if you run in to trouble.

Take care,
Paul

Thanks for the response Paul.

Not having done anything with Menu’s before I’ve taken a look at this is what I see –

The current theme does not natively support menus, but you can use the “Custom Menu” widget to add any menus you create here to the theme’s sidebar.

and gives me the option to create a menu. Not sure how to proceed?

Howdy,
Well, bummer that the theme doesn’t support native menus, but perhaps you could get by with the widget.
Let’s skip the menu situation.
1. Make your new category as I mentioned before, if you haven’t already.
2. Go ahead and put a couple test posts in that category.
3. Go to Appearance > Widgets
4. Drag either the “Recent Posts” widget OR the “Categories” widget over into the “Main Top 1” sidebar. (NOTE: You may have to open up the Main Top 1 sidebar by clicking that disclosure triangle in its title bar.)
5. Configure the widget if you need to.
6. Refresh your home page and see if it’s getting you anywhere.

Let me know how it goes.
Paul

Unfortunately unsuccessful – as you’ll see the theme has been designed so the widget areas are set out as six square boxes on the homepage. I already have a link to the news in the main top 1 widget area, but what I want is to keep this, but also have a page dedicated to all posts (possibly selectable by category or via a calendar).

Sorry if I wan’t clear earlier.

Hmm.
1. Can you use any of the available sidebars (instead of Main Top 1)?
— My goal with that is to get a link to your posts or categories on the home page somewhere.
— The “Categories” widget would like any blog categories you make, and if you clicked a category name, it would take you to a category archive page, listing all the posts in that category, newest first.

So, I guess the main thing right now is seeing if you can put that widget in one of those sidebar areas.

Paul

yes I’ve got that to work, so it is possible to view blogs depending on their category. Is there a way to assign all blogs to appear on a dedicated page other than the homepage though? (apart from using settings which rely on there being a named “homepage”)?

The fastest way I can think of is to create one parent category, and assign all your other categories as child categories.

Example:
Parent Category: News
Child Categories: Local News, Regional News, National News
In a tree it looks like this:
News
* Local News
* Regional News
* National News

Then, the category page for “News” will show all the posts that are classified with any of the child categories.

Does that make sense?
Paul

Yes it does – thank you for your help Paul. What I’ve got now isn’t what I had in mind but I think works better as a result!

That’s great–glad to hear it! Have a great day.