BrianL51

Thank you very much Steve. I tried Andrew’s helpful suggestion first, and got as far as installing AMPPS. It was just too much of a learning curve for someone like me. Local By Flywheel seems to be the way to go for someone with unsophisticated needs and very little time. The only wrinkle so far was having to make a BIOS change (to enable VTx) but now I have a local site with a very similar configuration to the live one. As far as I can see all I have to do is copy in the live files and then start the major editing task. I’m really grateful for all these suggestions, for I’d never have got this far without them.

Many thanks for that Andrew, I’ll take a look. There’s a lot of information at that link, so I should be able to find what I need. Believe it or not, I didn’t know that you could simply(?) install a local site like that. If I can figure out how to get it done, I’ll be able to get a lot more done a lot more quickly than ever before.

I did take a long look at the Feed Items Not Importing link, but nothing there seemed to address my problem. I gave up. I was reminded of it all when alerted about citizenchan’s post and so took another look.

The only thing that’s changed is that the two feeds I’ve set up now say “Next Update: 5 months”. Nothing I’ve read makes any mention of that, and it makes no sense whatever to me. The feed items in preview, which won’t import, are all just a few hours old.

Many thanks for your help. It works now. Auto Sort was not checked, because I could not understand the associated text describing its function. I believe that the author of the plugin is not a native English speaker.

The perfect solution! Wow – how I wish I had asked the question before. It’s taken me no more than ten minutes to make the changes across the whole site and putting in those cues makes such an obvious difference. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed the drop-down on the menu box before, so I was equally unaware of the title attribute facility, which is also very useful.

I really can’t thank you enough for taking the time to think about this and point me in the right direction… I really do appreciate it.

For the sake of anyone else who gets stuck with the same problem, I should update this thread as I’ve figured out a few things.

Thanks again to Josh – a custom menu was definitely the way to go, but that wasn’t the whole story. I also had to learn to appreciate Categories.

The most important thing I realised though was that posts don’t appear on any page. This is a simple conceptual issue. Posts look as though they’re on a page, but they’re not: at least not on any page that could appear in the list of user-defined pages. Once I realised that, I was on the way to getting a better idea of the way things fitted together.

The TwentyEleven theme may be a safe choice for a beginner, but I’m beginning to find it limiting. My next challenge is to try something different, but that’s another story.

Many thanks Josh. There are so many aspects to learn, so it’s really helpful to be steered in the right direction. I really appreciate the guidance, and at first glance it looks as though I should find my solution there. I’ll work my way through it later.