how to link to ‘blog’ category

visit the blog category, copy the link…

I just did this, creating a master “Course Announcements” category and putting all the other categories into it, and now my Categories menu in the sidebar doesn’t work at all. It just says “No Categories” in bold type.

I guess it doesn’t recognize subcategories, and the fact that the top level category has only subcategories in it and no actual posts means it can’t find the categories that have the content.

Is there any way to fix this? My dad (whose site this is that I’m working on) wanted a static welcome page, but there also needs to be a functional categories menu so that his students can click through to the announcements for their particular course.

Before I put the other categories into the master Course Announcements category, they showed up OK, but I put them in there so that there could be a master “Announcements” link in the horizontal menu bar he wants me to add (because he thinks the sidebar navigation is too hard for people to find!) So I do need to have some way of linking to, essentially, what would have been on the front page before I installed the plug-in. Is there any way to have both that and a functional categories menu that will show the subcategories?

Addition to the above: I looked up template tags in the Codex, hoping there might be a solution in editing the theme files, and found that the wp_list_cats tag that the theme I’m using uses can have values set for showing empty categories and showing children (subcats).

So I set hide_empty to 0, and children to 1… But it still says “No Categories”. The full argument list I now have in the template is:

wp_list_cats(0, 'All', 'name', 'asc', '', 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0,'','','',0)

which *should* make it show empty categories and include all subcategories, but no luck. Anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong?

The site is https://www.arts.yorku.ca/soci/barent/ if that helps.

I think for now I’m just going to have to get rid of the master category and put the categories back the way they were, but if a solution ever turns up I would love to be able to have a link to a master Announcements page.

Posts that are in the ‘blog’ category go in the master catergory, and only those. It doesn’t scan for posts in subcategories, because WP’s lack of preordered trees and legacy MySQL’s lack of stored procedures makes this far too resource extenstive to look into them.

For a similar reason, WP will consider an empty category with subcategories that have posts in them as empty. You need to put the posts in the ‘blog’ category _and_ in their subcategory.