Well, the WordPress lessons are a good place to start –or so I’m told. I’ll admit to “jumping into the deep end” ??
To solve this specific problem,
o Login as administrator
o Go to the Design menu and click the Widgets item
You may not have anything listed in the “Current Widgets” column (or you may get an error when you click the Widgets item) in which case your sidebar is being controlled by a “sidebar.php” file which you can edit (see below). However, for “getting started” it’s recommended that you stick to widgets (and choose a theme that supports widgets) so continue with these steps:
o If it’s not already on the right hand side, drag the Pages widget from the “Available Widgets” to the right hand column.
o Click the “edit” link in its title bar and in the “sort by” drop down, click “page order”
o Save changes and revisit the site.
Go back to the Widgets panel to add other chunks of the sidebar. It’ll take some experimentation, but you may get the functionality you want very quickly.
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If you don’t want to use widgets (again, they’re highly recommended) you can go to Design > Theme Editor and edit the sidebar.php directly. Look for where that file uses wp_list_pages and configure its parameters appropriately. [In my experiments, though, it seems that in WP 2.5.1 and 2.6, the default for wp_list_pages is menu_order (aka Page Order), not the documented post_title (i.e. alphabetically).]
