Really trying to understand this page orginazation

Why not just use author templates? Those are built in.

https://pittspolitics.com/wordpress/author/cpitts7014/
https://pittspolitics.com/wordpress/author/test/

As for making the home page a static page, this is built in too. Just make a new Page that will become the home page. Put whatever content you want in it. Then make a new Page with no content, but with the name “blog” or whatever you want, because this will become the new blog page. Then change the settings on the Settings->Reading page to set which is the front page and which page will hold the blog posts.

Theming stuff like this is easy, but you really do need to understand the Template Hierarchy.

Each author does have their own archive page, so for instance – https://pittspolitics.com/wordpress/author/cpitts7014/ – is an author archive page; it contains only posts created by that particular author. And, as you can see, the rest of the template is maintained. You could simply link users to these author pages, if that solves the issue.

To move it out of the root directory, you will need to actually move all of your files on the server. Alternatively, you can add a redirect script to your current index.html page, which would send users to the WordPress site instantly – https://php.about.com/od/learnphp/ht/phpredirection.htm

Well im little confused as I dont want these to be archive pages.
I want them to be regular pages. Every time an author Writes a post, I want it to automatically go to a sepcific page and no otehr page (except the arhichive page obviously) In the documents I see there for page arhives, it says it looks for author.php first. That file is there but not in the drop down menu for templates. So Im assuming default template and wordpress searches for it first??? Its still not showing the post from a specific author, and all the information that you can show via the $curarch is everything EXCEPT the actuall posts…

How do i make the page Carl Pitts, Only show posts from Carl, not link to his archive page… How do I make the page Chad ONeal, show posts written by Chad Oneal, without having to link to his archive page. I really dont want a Main page at all. the only reason I have decided to keep a Main Page, (which will be called blog news) is so I the administrator can add posts about upcomming changes, etc…

2. After I made the about me page the static page, and then the Carl Pitts page the Main post page(which wil be changed the news as seen above so Carl Pitts page can be used just for his posts) the “home” page button still stays up on the top left, but links to About the Authors..

ANYONE CONFUSED YET!?!?! I am so sorry.. I really am trying hard to understand the heirachy, but it seems like there is sub heirachies and i dont know how to make it call on the ones I want.

at https://www.pittspolitics.com/wordpress
This is how I want the site to look as soon as you type that in the browser

About the Authors News Carl Pitts Chad ONeal Links Archives

About the Authors— The static page, and about me section

News — The Main blog page(if you will)where the administrator writes about upcomming changes, news etc….

Carl Pitts — All of Carl’s(author 1) posts to display

Chad ONeal — All of Chad’s (author 2) posts to display

Links — links

Archives — regular archive format for both authors

To make more effiecent use of the loop I am willing to have the “news” page the “main” page that the loop is in, and just use Category exclusion to elliminate carl and chads posts. I can always add links to each authors posts or wahtever from there. But DEFFAINLY not neccisary.

But the problem, after I made Carl Pitts page and Chad ONeal page
I am not seeing the individaul posts where do I set the tag to actually show the posts for these authors weather it be in virute of the archive templates or what????

I really am trying hard to understand the heirachy, but it seems like there is sub heirachies and i dont know how to make it call on the ones I want.

Well, you’re kinda all over the place here, so I don’t understand what exactly you don’t understand about it. Calm down. Relax. Stop trying to do silly things and make a plan instead. Understand WTF you’re doing BEFORE you change things.

In very simple terms… WordPress has two kinds of things: Posts and Pages. Do NOT get these confused, they are wholly separate. Posts show up where posts show up (all sorts of places) and Pages only show up on their specific Page. Pages are outside the hierarchy entirely.

The Hierarchy defines where Posts appear. A Post appears in lots of places. On the main blog page, on the author pages, on the category pages, on tag pages, in date archives, etc. The point here is that you should not think of it as sending the post to all these places. Instead, you need to think of it from the URL perspective. The URL tells WordPress what Posts it is supposed to get and display.

So that URL above (https://pittspolitics.com/wordpress/author/cpitts7014/ ) tells WordPress to go get all of Carl’s posts and display them. Simple.

Now, the Template Hierarchy that we linked to earlier defines on what Template they appear on. If we’re looking at author posts, then first WordPress is going to look for author.php in the them. If it finds it, then it uses it. If not, it goes down a level and looks for the next one. And so on, until it finally gives up and resorts to index.php.

My point is that WordPress *always* loads one and only one Template from the theme per page display. Usually this is the index.php file, because most people look at the main blog page. That one and only Template loads everything else, like the header, the footer, the sidebar, whatever. It’s the starting point.

So when you go to https://pittspolitics.com/wordpress/author/cpitts7014/, then you not only get all of Carl’s posts (without changing ANYTHING in the theme at all), but you also get WordPress to look for author.php, archive.php, and finally index.php, using the first one it finds to make the page display. Got it?

Pages work entirely differently. Pages are self-standing entities, outside the system. They use the page.php or the index.php file to display themselves, and they can also each have “custom” things called “Page Templates” assigned to them if you want. However, you should never think about Pages as holding Posts, because they don’t. Posts are separate entirely.

Does that help any? I really don’t understand much of the rest of your post, so you’ll have to ask questions one at a time…

okay so after learning a little theory, its almost like saying there is NO solution to my problem????. Why cant a “PAGE” show the url
https://www.pittspolitics.com/wordpress/authors/cpitts7014?

I dont think its very silly to have the standard idea of how files are organized to be implimented here, even though i Understand what you are saying.

—–What i need is simple. when a user comes to my blog, i dont want them to see any posts at all from any of my authors. Only the about me section. that has been covered and works fine. then, I want the reader to be able to choose ONE author, and read that authors posts very easily without having to jump through a whole bunch of links and backdoor hoops. Leave comments, rate, share, whatever, only for the. author. Then if they choose they can go to another author and do the same for them. If you goto the site, I have the pages layed out how i WANTED them before your last post. Someone needs to make a plugin that DOES make Pages a place to put specific topic posts.—

Why cant an author have there own space????

So that URL above (https://pittspolitics.com/wordpress/author/cpitts7014/ ) tells WordPress to go get all of Carl’s posts and display them. Simple.

Nobody is going to be typing in this URL.
The only solution I see is to make a complete dynamic web template, dont used wordpress at all for the page, redirect to those pages you gave me links of(the authors) and show the content.

this is rediculous.

why can pages show $cuathor information, but not post information?

Bigpips: How about a little love for the folks who are trying very patiently to help you out. WordPress is an incredibly powerful and flexible platform, but you need to understand how it works and what it is designed to do before you start criticizing it for what it doesn’t do.

Have you thought about separate WP installs in different directories for each of your authors with one static landing page that links to all of them?

First and for-most…my PROFOUND appologies. I am a quick speaker, and I try to write as close to they way I talk as possiable in order to keep a sense of realism. My love is above and beyond that of a little for any one who puts hard work and dedication into anything. Especially anything or anyone helping me. Im a a practical person, I know “it cant be done” when I hear it and thats the same thing my friends and family told me when I was trying to be a man and take on the world myself, RIGHT before I packed up my things with 186 dollars and moved to the other side of the country on a wink and a handshake and built a life from scratch. I am LEARNING how it works, and may or may not “understand completley” ever how it works. Whats its designed to do is irrlevant to what Im trying to make it do. Im an imporvisor, and what better then computer software then a place to improvise. Constructive critisism is relavent to seeking an answer to my problem. If I wanted to “disrespect” any body who took time or effort to help or create this. I would say it directly to them, not disguise it in rhetorical dialouge. So please do not acuse me of being ungratefull. I am big donater in the blogging world, and support any way I “know” how to and always been a VERY generious person. Even though my parents are Caucasion American, my mother was born and raised in India with no running water or electricity until she graduated highschool and moved to America. I grew up in a household that knows a thing or to about gratefullness.

this is rediculous.

Maybe a LITTLE out of line, and if so I apollogize, but it was just an opinion of my “situation”
not a personal attack on anybody.

Have you thought about separate WP installs in different directories for each of your authors with one static landing page that links to all of them?

This sounds feesable….. I think I may have asked about this at some point and time. The question is about the linking…… how do I link someone from “Chad ONeal” buttom up top, to the page with Chad Oneal’s posts.

If my wordpress main page was nothing more then a mere .dwt out of frontpage or expression, and everything underneath it was content that ws views in virtue of clicking links ON .dwt file that is how I would like it to work.
Naturally, when you see buttons at the top of a page

Main About Me Links Archives Author 2

you want to think that each of these is links to a differnt page
Not that these are there own ” entity”
and the main button has all this elaberate looping, but about me and follows are there own thing completely

If they could click the author 2 button, and maintaining the templates see a whole nother loop from a seperate install I am ALL for it. Ill install 10 of it if I have to to have 10 DIFFERENT post pages. Whatevers clever…… How to I make the data.. that I type in to the wysiwig editor ONLY show up under Author 2 and not Main. Its just data, I should be able to make it veiwable anywere????

What I envisioned was a purely static html page as your landing page using basic html links to separate WP installs. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

cant i just make the viewable portion of that page
show https://www.pittspolitics.com/wordpress/authors/cpitts7014
or tp://www.pittspolitics.com/wordpress/authors/coneal

I mean you can do php redirects, and add java scripts. If every time you make a post it is its OWN url, why cant you just SHOW the content of that url on the page

okay sorry forgot a couple things I had in mind…

a question in regards to organazation…

Every time a blogger writes a new post.. do they keep track of the url?
Is that standard. I will try to make this easier for everyone. especially the owner of the blog, Carl Pitts.

I really just dont want 200 posts on one page, with 2 authors giving 2 completley different views. I think this agreeably is not to much to ask. So Im trying to give this author arhive a try..
Make the Chad ONeal page have all of the arhcives of Chad posts
and the Carl Pitts Page have all the archives of carl’ s posts
i just dont undertand how to make thoes pages use the author.php template. It is not selectable in the template drop down menu.

on the codex page, it only shows how to add curathur string content like name, or birthday or thigns like that

There are category plugins that do this. Make one for Chad and the other for Carl. Then if you are using permalinks, it won’t be hard to discern the URL for each author’s link. Something along the lines of
https://www.pittspolitics.com/oped/carl/
https://www.pittspolitics.com/oped/chad/

That’s just an example and assumes you use categories called “Carl” and “Chad” and a category “name” of “oped” (for Op-Ed). You could easily use their whole names or surnames only as the categories, however you want the URL to look, ultimately.

You could also jazz up each author’s [category] page using specific category templates for each one. Does this make sense? If I had just two authors posting, and I wanted to divide their posts the way you want, that’s what I’d do.

Then, if you want to divide posts into topics, you can use WP’s native tags instead, maybe with a tag cloud on the sidebar.

HTH.

I guess I still am not understanding the problem here.. Why not just make links to those author pages on your main page somewhere? What exactly is the problem?

Nobody is going to be typing in this URL.

Why in the world would they type in the URL? You have your front page have this “About Me” thing, right? So on that, or wherever the heck you want, you put links to the two author pages. They click them, they see the posts by that author. Simple.

What exactly is the issue, really? Why can you not link to the author pages?

You seem to think that you need to make a “Page” to hold these posts. You don’t need to do that. Pages do not hold Posts.

As far as using your author.php, you don’t need to specifically select it. The links to the author pages that you already have use the author.php automatically. There’s nothing to do. There’s no need to make any Pages. Just link to the author pages. That’s why they exist.

Maybe you think that you need to make Pages because your theme shows the Pages in a tabbed format or something like that? Is that the problem? Because if that’s the case, then that’s not what you need to do. Instead of making Pages do something that they’re not supposed to do, you need to change that menu bar to show what you actually want it to show instead.

Most menu bars in themes are in the header.php or similar. If you look closely at it, it will have a call to wp_list_pages. This is what makes each Page name appear in that bar. All you have to do is to add a call to wp_list_authors to get the authors to appear in there too. Simple.

Define the problem properly, and then the answer will come out correct. Don’t try to make things do weird stuff, use the functions as they were intended to be used, and things are much simpler.

Hi bigpips305,
I created a plugin which prevents the 404 at the authors page when no posts where written by this author, perhaps it fits your problem?

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/show-authors-without-posts/