After talking to Support back and forth over the issues some have had over posts that did not appear on the front of the blog – the best we can come up with is that all posts intended for the FRONT PAGE of the blog should be published by NOT TICKING any category in the Category trees.
After the post has been published the Publish button becomes an Update button and you will see that Main Page at the top of the category tree is automatically ticked. Now, if Main Page is not at the top of your category tree it is because the list of available categories CHANGES according to your recent activity. WordPress automatically puts any post made onto the Front Page of the blog by default and we have tried to prevent this using a plugin so that it is possible to put content by subject matter into various categories archives.
Why do we have a Main Page category? This was created when the blog was moved to wordpress. It is our old main page at the other blog. I do not want to delete this category because it contains all of our oarchived posts from the front page of the other blog! Years of content…
So thinking you are posting to the front of the blog by ticking Main Page (as I had previously instructed) is incorrect!
However, it seems that half the time this DOES result in your post being on the front page hence a lot of confusion!
The plugin that chooses what content from the categories goes to the front of the blog includes “main page” and I allowed that category to appear on the front of the blog thinking that if we all tick main page our content there will go to the front of the blog and there will be no missing content – but that is not really working in every case!
Volker had a recent issue in which his article not only wasn’t seen on the front of the blog but wasn’t even listed in Recent Posts! This is why I contacted support (who hosted the blog) who kindly gave me all the information they could. Otherwise, I have to contact the plugin designer to see what is going on. But then I discovered that if you do NOT tick “main page” your post will go to the front of the blog as well as to the “main page” category for some unknown reason only understandable by coders!
If we all get into the new habit of not choosing “main page” as a publishing choice when we first publish our article our posts should all appear on the front of the blog!
This means you must publish your article without choosing ANY category at all – then when the Publish button becomes the Update button add in the categories you want the article to be seen in and click Update! It is a two step process!
If you only chose a category before you first publish the article will only be seen in the categories you ticked. And may not appear on the front of the blog. Main Page is supposed to be allowed to appear on the front of the blog so it often does, apparently. But to guarantee your article will go to the front of the blog do “the Errol Flynn Two – Step” and you should be guaranteed of success!
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Errol was having one of his jokes on us!
—- let’s all give this a try!
— David DeWitt
Mary Ann
July 10, 2012 at 7:41 pm
David, I have done this as you said and it works.
David DeWitt
July 10, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Good! I don’t know why life can’t just be simple and easy, but it sure isn’t!
Volker
July 11, 2012 at 5:57 am
David,
thank you for investigating this.
Let’s do the “Errol Flynn Two-Step” :)