Confused about Pages

It’s not really a problem, IMHO. Okay, this is how it works inside. But as soon as you use nice URLs (and you really should) that is completely hidden from the visitor.

Okay, then sell me on the benefits of nice URLs as opposed to those auto-generated by WP. ??

I may have been trying to figure this out for a while but some things are still beyond me (when I’m yet to look into them).

I thought about what you are asking, and it bothered me at first, a little, but when I realized it made absolutely no difference to anything I did, life went on.

The order of the Pages is controlled by their name and the page order, not the ID number they are entered into the database. Honestly, the only one who knows that id number 7 is a post and 8 is a Page is you because you snooped into the database.

Pages don’t pass through chronologically in your loop results. Unless you list them specifically with the wp_list_pages() tag or a direct link in some way, they don’t show up anywhere. They don’t get old and they don’t interfer with all the categories because they have no categories only parent Pages and child Pages.

When you get to post number 594, Page 8 doesn’t impact you still.

As for breaking up the numbering order of the posts, since posts are ordered by name, date and ID number, and date has control over everything else by default, the fact that there isn’t a post 8 doesn’t matter because 7 will be followed by 9. When you get to post 594, that missing 8 still doesn’t matter. Who will know and who will really care.

Are you doing something that totally relies upon the fact that the order of the posts goes 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc? Once you change to permalinks, there will be no more 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 but actual titles to replace the numbers and that won’t matter much any more, too.

If we knew exactly why this is so important, we might be able to better help you. My WordPress site is treated like a CMS and I fight constantly against the forced chronological order and almost never think about the post order. Page order is set in the Admin, so I deal with things there easily, much easier than the posts. When I need posts to be in a specific date order, I have to go into the database or edit each post to change the date order like this:

series post 1 – May 30
series post 2 – May 29
series post 3 – May 28
series post 4 – May 27

or something like that so the first article in the series has the most recent date instead of being the oldest – that’s a headache!

Quote:

“Honestly, the only one who knows that id number 7 is a post and 8 is a Page is you because you snooped into the database.”

Actually, this is incorrect.

When I make a post with a default install of WP v1.5 (default template) the title of the post comes up as the following link “wp/?p=1”.

The category link at the bottom of the post shows up as “wp/index.php?cat=1”, comments as “wp/?p=1#comments” and so on.

If somebody was to link to one of my Pages the default URL would be along the lines of “/wp/?page_id=8”.

I didn’t have to snoop anywhere to see that and it only occured to me because somebody trackbacked to a post of mine using the “wp/?p=1” link (which takes you right to the post they wanted).

I saw that you can use the date but that’s worthless when you post more than once a day on various subjects which is why I left it at the default setting. I was going to look into the post-slug thing (which is why I was asking about the clean URLs mentioned above) but I tend to have long titles and a URL ceases to be clean when it gets rather long. IMHO I think that “?post=1” is cleaner than “this-is-the-rather-long-title-to-my-post” but if somebody can show me the real merits of the other way of doing this I’m certainly interested.

[EDIT – forgot to mention the page URL in the first part]

I looked at the “Permalinks” under options and it says I have to play with mod_rewrite to get my links to be “Clean”. This is where it got beyond me and why I didn’t just try that option.

Permalinks are well worth using.

The main advantage is future proofing your site. If for some reason you decide to change blog software you can import your old posts and keep the same urls. Then if people bookmark your site they can still find their way to the old pages.

A title that describes the content of the page apparently improves search engine ranking. Remember that you don’t have to have the title of the page as the url. That is default but WordPress also gives you the ability to change the link to something you want to use.

?post=1 is shorter, but it makes no sense to anyone except the blogging software. You can change the permalink structure to use any format you like. Personally I went for year/month/post-title.

IMO if your webhost supports mod rewrite (the feature neccessary to do all this) then you should definately go for it. The pros outweigh any cons (and I can’t see any).

You don’t have to play with mod rewrite. As long as your host supports it and you set permissions so that files can be written it will create all of the required .htaccess stuff for you.

Thanks a billion BinaryMoon. I’ve been out for the last few days so I’ll check with my host and see what’s what. ??

Ok.

My host has mod_rewrite support and I tried the permalink structure and I like it I ran into one problem;

It killed the plugin “Perisort” and caused my categories to vanish. Any ideas?

Was the perisort plugin replacing your use of wp_list_cats()? If so, then copy the code from the default or classic theme and paste in place of where you had the Perisort plugin tag.

If not, then search for your wp_list_cats() or list_cats() tag and modify it to make it do what you want.