A Very Basic Tutorial – Part III

With this post I will conclude the tutorial sessions on creating and managing menu items. Click Part I and/or Part II, if you did not yet read them. I will use the ‘Klopp Story’ tab above as an example of the hierarchical nature of a more complex menu structure.

As you can see from the tree diagram above, the ‘Klopp Story’ page (Parent) has two children (sub items) ‘Book One’ and ‘Book Two’. The latter is still empty waiting for the Grandchildren to be written. Book One has five sub items, which are the grandchildren of the ‘Klopp Story’. As the diagram indicates, I had to create seven pages all together. To avoid confusion, it is important to note that each page you create must have its own unique name.

In the ‘Menus’ section that you control as the administrator you find that your sub items may scattered all over the place in a fairly unorganized fashion. Click and drag the sub item ‘Book One’ under the ‘Klopp Story’ and move it a bit to the right to make it a Child (sub item). Then click and drag the Chapter sub items and move them a little more than before to the right as shown on the diagram above. Treat the ‘Book Two’ sub item the same way as the ‘Book One’ item. Make sure to save the changed main menu, when you are done. Please note you can experiment without fear of messing up your blog site, since you can always the Menus section later and delete all the undesirable pages. Happy Blogging!

A Very Basic Tutorial – Part I

The klopp-family.com blog is now in its third year. While I absolutely claim no expertise in setting up and managing a blogging website using WordPress, I do believe that I have learned a few things during the past 24 months that are worth sharing. Let me state right from the outset that the tips on organizing a family history blog are for the novice to help him/her avoid the common pitfalls in a genealogy oriented blog. This article is also targeting all those who are struggling with keeping a semblance of order  in their blog with multiple strands of topics. So if you are just publishing one genre, such as poetry, short stories, book reviews, photographs etc., then this post is not for you.

The first thing to notice is that your home page presents your posts in reverse chronological order. What you published most recently, will appear on top of the stack. So the readers who join you much later will be annoyed that the great chronicle of your grandparents or your latest crime thriller are presented backwards.

The remedy is to create at least one page for every major topic you plan to cover on your blog. For a starter let’s keep it simple. On a subsequent post I will explain how to create multiple pages and even sub-pages. Let us assume you want to embark on writing  your autobiography. For this you need to create a new page. You do this by clicking on Pages, then on Add New,  and enter the title, e.g. ‘“My Autobiography” and Publish the page. Unfortunately, when you want to preview it on your website, it does not show up yet on the menu bar. Go back to the dashboard, click on Appearance and then on Menus. There check off the box for the page you just created and press save. Now this page should show up as a menu item on your website.

On my next post I will demonstrate how to fill this page in the correct chronological order with the posts you created on your home page. Till then Happy Blogging!