dds

Sadly, I don’t know how to attach things to the forum post. Basically, I just customized my regular theme header in the usual way: AdminPanel>Appearance>Editor>Patterns>Header, customize, save. It appeared properly on my front page, which is edited in Elementor.

Then I was trying out different things in Elementor, and trying out some plugins, and generally exploring, because this is my first crack at making a website. I wanted to make a maintenance mode page, because I don’t like tinkering around with trial and error in public, and I felt I could do better than Hostinger’s default page. AdminPanel>Elementor>Tools>Maintenance Mode> click on “create one now” > Edit with Elementor. The blank slate it gives me to customize has the Header at the bottom, below the Footer, and no way to grab it. You can see this as I have put the site in maintenance mode for you.

Then I noticed that it was on the bottom of the posts I had edited in Elementor, and Elementor has no way to access the Header or Footer in the Structures view like you can in List View of the WordPress editor. And, on the pages provided by Elementor, I can’t change or swap the header-footers at all, I’m stuck with what Elementor says, right? So I’d basically have to build the Contact Us page and all them from Elementor from scratch, if I want to use my own header-footer on them, right? Or is there a way to work on headers and footers within Elementor?

Oh, wow, I just fixed the header-at-bottom problem: I found my Single Posts template had the header at the bottom below the footer and moved it to the top and that fixed not only the posts, but also the Maintenance Page! Who knew the Maintenance Page was actually a Single Post?

Thanks very much for your help, sorry for the false alarm about Header location. I am already easily confused, and when all this started happening at once I wasn’t yet knowledgeable enough to realize it was actually two separate issues. Now the only question is how to edit or swap out headers within Elementor. Anxiously awaiting your response, Kind Regards.

Actually just found another problem related to headers and footers. I went to make a Maintenance Mode template, which did in fact use my customized header and footer. The problem is, the header appears at the bottom, below the footer. The same thing happened on my post titled “Test Post Blog”. With the header and footer not accessible in the Structure panel, how did the header get moved to the bottom, and how do I move it back? (The header appears at the top like it should on the Home page.)

Thank you, Joel.

Not sure what “select the desired direction” means, but I have found the answer to my question about the preview eyecon. The preview eyecon only puts you in desktop preview, even if you are editing in the tablet or mobile viewport. To view the site in tablet or mobile modes, you just hide the sidebar menu. Thanks.

I can’t replicate the problem now, either. Maybe I got mixed up.

The fact that every theme I tried acted the same way with the query loops only working on the page designated as Posts Page (which is always under whatever theme’s Blog Home template, indicates that the “only one posts page per site” thing is not a feature of any theme, but is built-into core WordPress itself. Therefore I already switched to another block theme I like better.

None of the TwentyTwentyFour forum replies spoke of blog pages. They all refer to the Blog Page, singular, and seem to verify that, yes, there is only one Posts page per site. Has anyone repeated the experiment to try and verify my results?

The Elementor forum mostly tells people with Pro upgrades to start a help ticket and share no information with the rest of us, or advises the Elementor Free users to upgrade to Pro. My question never even got posted. But one of my reply comments in this WordPress forum up and disappeared too, son not sure what to think.

So since the only-one-posts-page-per site restriction seems built-in to core WordPress because all the half-dozen block themes I tried act the same way, and since the plugins I tried are over my head, I repeat the question: Is there a way in basic WordPress to have the query loop return posts of Category A when the blog is clicked into from Page A, and posts of Category B when clicked from Page B, etc? Better yet, is there a way to make a Category A query loop on Page A (not?the Posts Page under the Blog Home template) that actually returns the posts on the live site?

Thank you for that link to Elementor Support Forum. Until now, I could only find documentation, and a button that said if I want more support I should go Pro. This should be very helpful, unless you have to go Pro to ask the Forum. Still, at least I can search it.

On the query loops, I believe I’m using the Site Editor, I don’t know of any other editor. How can I tell the Site Editor from any other editor there might be?

I am using Theme TwentyTwentyFour. I tried copying the query loop from the Blog Home template to another template, copying it to a page, applying a copy of the Blog Home template to a page, tried inserting a query loop block onto a page, inserting a query loop onto a template. I replicated these scenarios in other block themes.

In none of these cases did the query loop list anything in the previews nor the live site. They all show the blog posts in the page editor and template editor, but the only query loops that actually list the posts on preview or live pages are the ones on the Blog Home template, which is applied to whatever page you designate as the Posts page in AdminPanel>Settings>Reading. The Blog Posts template overrides everything on that page, so what is displayed in preview and live page looks exactly like the Blog Home template, no matter how you design your page. You might as well just assign a blank page as Posts Page.

Putting a query loop anywhere else but the Blog Home template does not work, even on an exact duplicate template. What this means is, I can have one and only one page that actually displays posts on a live site. I have seen several similar topics in the forums, but never found an answer in them, nor in the help docs.

It seems a reasonable expectation to have some means of looping posts of just one category depending on which page a visitor clicks into the blog from, but having only one posts page per site makes that virtually impossible. Is it true?

The only way I can think of is to have single-category subdomains, each with its own Blog Home template — too cumbersome — or install some plugin that calls for deeper knowledge than I possess. Is there a way in basic WordPress to have the query loop return posts of Category A when the blog is clicked into from Page A, and posts of Category B when clicked from Page B, etc? Better yet, is there a way to make a Category A query loop on Page A (not the Posts Page under the Blog Home template) that actually returns the posts on the live site?

Thanks.

• This reply was modified 7 months, 1 week ago by dds.

Thank you for the suggestions, M. Huff. Yes, I have read that site editor article many times, without much luck. Either it does not address the things I want to do, or the instructions simply don’t work. For example, when clicking the link for Query Loop Block documentation, those instructions clearly state that the query loop block can be added to a page. Yet the query loop added to a page displays no output on the preview nor the live site. Nothing. The Latest Posts block does.

I did install that Category Posts Widget plugin, and indeed the Customize option does then exist under AdminPanel>Appearance, but there is no Category Posts Widget showing up anywhere. Apparently the only way to access the widget is with shortcode. The plugin’s instructions say you can put the shortcode into any content anywhere. It does not work in the paragraph block, it does not work in the Shortcode Widget. Or, if it does, I can’t follow how to work it.

I just keep getting stuck between statements like “no coding necessary” and instructions like the Shortcode Block instructions that call for understanding the code. As a beginner, I never even heard of Shortcode before and have no idea how to use it or format it; the example in the Shortcode Block documentation is just gibberish to me, and does not help to understand putting shortcode into a Category Posts Widget. I type in exactly what the Category Post Widget plugin instructions say, and it does not work.

I have given up on my original plan, I have abandoned all the fancy ideas, I now just want a simple blog site that can land on a particular post from a link in a different site built with a site builder. I tried Elementor until blue in the face but maybe there’s still hope for that. I can’t figure out how to resize an image though. Every setting I try just leaves it the same, but at least I can send it behind the text with the Z-index feature.

It would be better to use Elementor than the Site Builder I actually got a Home Page to work in, since I could migrate it to a different hosting service someday but, I can’t get any of the Blog functions in Elementor to work, so I have to jump into the blog from an outside page. Except I can’t get the blog functions in core WordPress to work either. Can you tell me please, is it possible to edit a home page with Elementor, but edit the blog posts page or pages in core WordPress, for the same site? (This would be better than having a jumble of subdomains to handle each category. The reason I ask is that Elementor documentation says you can’t display posts by category without going Pro.)

I finally figured out that query loops do not work outside of the Blog Home template. Even a second query loop added to the Blog Home template doesn’t work. So only one Blog Page, and only one Query loop. Please tell me I’m wrong, and if so, how to get query loops to work elsewhere than once in Blog Home?

Somewhere in all the documentation it states that a visitor clicking on a post’s category will display a list of posts from that category. That may be an adequate workaround, if it’s true, though not exactly the functionality I am after.

The Elementor site I’m practicing on is called staging.dixonsforum.com, and the basic WordPress site I am practicing on is called blog.dixonsforum.com.

I ran a matrix of templates and query loops, including copying the query loop from Blog Home, Copying the whole Blog Home and deleting everything else, and other scenarios. What I found was, the query loop will not function unless you use the original query loop from the original Blog Home template. You are forced to edit the Theme’s original Blog Home template, and a query loop applied to any other template, or inserted directly into any page, will not return results to the live site. “Blog Home” means the home of the Blog page, not the Home Page of the Blogs, like I had first inferred.

And I just spent hours creating a template called Pages Copy, which has a header, a content block, and a query loop. Yet when I create a new page and select that new template for it, nothing shows. It’s just a blank page with nothing in the list view, and on the page viewer, nothing shows up but the Header. I could not get the query loop to nest inside the comment block either. What should I be doing differently?

And now Blog Home has disappeared from AdminPanel>Appearance>Editor>Pages, and been replaced by Test Page. Curiouser and curiouser. I’ll keep trying.

Oh, so this link here goes to the Test Page, it’s only my View Site mode that still goes to the theme “Blog Home” thing. I see the link here is only http instead of https like my AdminPanel>Settings>General>URLs say. That’s a whole other new issue. : |

So, I went through all those lessons and followed most every link. Most of them took me to articles I had read already. I was earlier confused why I kept seeing “no coding needed”, then seeing exhibits of code snippets in the articles, but now I understand not all the articles are geared towards beginners.

Some of the training is outdated, like directions that no longer apply, like to select dropdown items that don’t exist. All those file preparations for the playground setup, very daunting to read about, no longer need to be done at all.

I learned a few more things than my earlier poke-and-hope, trial-and-error efforts had taught, and all of that was re-iterated, so that’s good. Sadly, I did not learn the two main things I’m trying to do.

One is how to set up an image as wallpaper with the content text scrolling in front of it. This isn’t top priority right now though. The main thing I need to know how to do is start a new page with some other template than “Pages.”

Also there’s the original problem of the home page, called Blog Home, not showing up in the navigation block. The Page List widget documentation says it will display all published pages, yet the Home Page does not appear in the navigation menu. Somewhere in all this reading something said the Blog Home template is the page. That would explain why it does not show up in the navigation menu (nor the Admin Panel>Pages screen), but not why it shows up as home page on the live site.

Oh, didn’t see your post before I put my last one, sorry. Thank you for the lesson links. I will follow them up today. I did spend a lot of time reading reviews on website builders and hosting services before deciding on WordPress. Many more hours since in support documentation and forum searches, since the set-up-your-site-in-minutes wordages. Lots of these articles seem to assume the reader knows a lot more than they actually do, leaving me more confused than before. I have gone back and re-read them several times as all the information starts to gel and connect in my mind.

It’s actually been about three weeks of working on it, trying to understand, reading and rereading articles and forum posts, asking many many questions of the Hostinger AI bots and support team, finally a couple of questions to the WordPress forums, so you’re helping an honest effort, however easily confusable I might be. Your time invested in helping me will not go to waste.

Oh! When I click upon the Page List block in List View, a popup message says, “This page list is synched with the published pages on your site. Detach the page list to add, delete, or reorder the pages yourself.” So I went and took some out of draft status and they popped into the header, just like that. Happy Easter, by the way, and thanks for your help.

But, the theme-provided Blog Home does not offer the option to make public, so how can it be a landing page? Obviously it’s published, so why isn’t it in the Navigation menu? How would a user get back there from another page?

Nor do the Search Results and Page 404. Like Blog Home, their sidebar menus only describe what they do, whereas the rest of the pages have links to change things like Status and supposedly templates, which I still don’t get the logic of:

If I’d like to change something on a certain page, WordPress says to edit its template. But if I change its template, those changes go out to every other page that uses that template. If I don’t want that to happen, I need to make a special template just for that particular page. If I have to make a special template for each page, why need templates at all? And, why when I want to edit the page Blog Home or Search Results, does WordPress take me straight to the template, not the page? What am I misunderstanding?

And also, how can I select the template I want? When I try to add a page, it gives me one and only one choice: Pages. That’s why my page called Posts has no posts. and I can’t figure out how to switch templates. The Swap Templates gives me one and only one choice: Blog Home Copy, which is an unedited copy of the original Blog Home that came with the theme. I don’t want that one on there either, and I certainly don’t want to edit the Pages template; I cannot grasp the logic in doing that when I may need it in its original form later. What am I misunderstanding here?