The main change I made in this version was converting all my content to posts rather than pages (except for a few pages like the “Welcome!” homepage and this page.) Here, I will discuss more what the difference is between posts and pages, and what my thoughts were on making the change.
Posts Versus Pages in WordPress
WordPress defines “Posts” and “Pages” differently. For me, the main difference was that followers would only get notified for new posts, not new pages. Furthermore, people who followed me via the WordPress reader would only see my posts in their feeds, not my pages — even old posts would show up in feeds, but pages never would. I wanted the feed for my site to reflect all my content on it, so I converted my pages to posts by manually copying-and-pasting their content to new posts which I then published. (If you see the history of when certain posts were published, there is a succession of many of them being published in a single day; that was due to this.) For me, this manual solution was fine because I didn’t have many pages (probably around 5-10); however, I’m not aware of a better or more systematic solution for people who want to do a conversion with many more pages.
Category Pages
When you publish posts, you can select categories for them. I think if you don’t define categories then the default defined by WordPress is “Uncategorized,” which all posts would then go into. Every post must have at least one category (including possibly “Uncategorized.”) Then, WordPress automatically creates category pages that you can access by going to YOUR_SITE_ADDRESS/category/CATEGORY_NAME. (For example, for my site, it’d be nihalduri.com/category/CATEGORY_NAME.)
These pages are public. Furthermore, if you go to a post with its category displayed, if you click on the category link it will take you to the category page.
Thus, when I used to create my own custom pages for different categories of content (separate from the category pages auto-generated by WordPress), clicking on a post’s category link would not go to my custom page, which I didn’t like. I had extra description and clarification on my custom pages, which is why I would have preferred to redirect to those. My menu items were links to my custom pages, but clicking on the category links on posts would take you to the different auto-generated pages.
I realized though that you can specify descriptions of categories and those would automatically be displayed on the auto-generated pages. This made everything easier: I removed my custom pages, updated the category descriptions, and just replaced the menu with links to the default-generated category pages. That made things smoother!
Previous/Next Buttons
Earlier, my site had shown “Previous/Next” buttons at the bottom of each post, but this was based on the chronological order of all my posts regardless of category or topic. This meant that if for example I wanted to publish a series but then continue it at a later date (by which time I would have had other posts in between), the “Previous/Next” buttons would be awkward. Instead, I was fine with removing the Previous/Next buttons, then indicating myself within the post whether it was part of a series and providing the links myself. This also made sense because my website would be about many different categories of content, and a chronological order that didn’t care about categories could jump around too much.
So my goal was to remove the Previous/Next buttons. To do this, I used Custom CSS, which I think is only offered via the WordPress Premium Plan (this is what I switched to in order to enable this.) This solution was suggested by this page. For me, using the Twenty-Twenty Theme, I added the following CSS to my theme customization (from the WordPress dashboard, Appearance, then Customize, then Additional CSS):
.pagination-single.section-inner {
display: none;
}
—
Modified March 16, 2023.
