phpBay Pro Tips

How to organize posts and pages on your phpBay site.

I always get people asking me how I set up my phpbay sites to look like real websites and not blogs. One of the best ways to make you phpBay site look like a real website is to be smart how you organize your posts and pages.

How do you do that? First of all, make your home page display just one page or post. There are a few ways to set that up. You can create your homepage content with a page, or with a post.

Before we get into that, download the Flexi Pages Widget. That’s what I use to display my pages in my sidebar. Add it to your sidebar and edit the settings so that “List sub-pages only in parent and related pages in hierarchy.” Is checked off. This lets you hide the sub pages under each page until that page is clicked, then it expands and shows the sub pages. That’s what I used on Discount Golf Balls.

How to use a Page for you phpBay Site home page
If you want to make it with a page, here’s what you do (in wordpress 2.5+). First, create a page and for the title, use your headline you want on the front page.

Now go to Settings>Reading and then where it says “front page displays” select “a static page” and then from the drop down list pick the page name you just created (the headline of your homepage).

Then go back to manage>pages and get the ID number of the page you just created. To do this, roll over the page title you just crated and in the bottom left of your browser, look at the target URL. It will say the page ID in there. Write it down. (I know this works in Fire Fox, not sure about IE.)

Now go to Design > widgets and add the pages widget to your sidebar (if it’s not there yet). Then edit that widget and add the page ID number you just wrote down to where it says “exclude pages”.

If you have a main site navigation, you can download this plugin to easily remove it from the menu 

Your homepage is now set up to display the contents of a single page, not wordpress posts.

How to use a Post for you phpBay Site home page
There is also another way to do it. This is more complicated. The advantage to doing it this next way si that with the previous way your page navigation will not have a “home” link. This next way allows you to have a “home” link in your main page navigation. But if your logo is clickable, you may not care so much. If you don’t care, you can skip down to the next section of this post.

First, download and install the Different Posts Per Page plugin. After you activate it, go to settings>DiffPostPerPage and set the homepage to display 1 post.

Now instead of creating a page, create a post and make the title the headline you want on your home page. Create a new category for this post and cal it “Home”.

Next we’re gonna get the category number by going to manage>categories then find the category called home and roll over it. Get the category ID number from the target URL in your browser ad write it down.

Now we’re gonna tell the homepage to only call posts from the category called “Home”. So go to Design> theme editor and open Index.php.

Look for this code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

Write below that, add this code:

<?php query_posts('p=1'); ?>

Change the number “1” to match the number you wrote down for the category ID of Home and save.

Now you have to remove the category “home” from showing up in your category widget in your sidebar. This is a little trickier than excluding pages from showing up.

First you need to use your FTP program and download your widgets.php file. It’s in WP-includes folder.

Once you open it, do a “Find” and look for $cat_args

You may see something like:
$cat_args = orderby=name&show_count={$c}&hierarchical={$h} "; (if yours is different, that’s fine).

Now we’re gonna exclude the home category by adding &exclude=1 (replace 1 with your category number).

So my line of code now looks like:
$cat_args = "orderby=name&show_count={$c}&hierarchical={$h}&exclude=1";

Save the file and upload it to the same place you got it from and replace the old one.

There, your home page will now only show the one post you created under home, and wont show any other posts you create.

Using Pages and Category widgets with phpBay sites
Now that your phpBay site has a proper homepage you can start adding products ad content.

I use pages to add products because then I can do sub-products with sub pages. And I use posts to show articles and content.

When writing content, create categories that can be high level. On Discount Golf Balls#mce_temp_url# I have my categories as “Golf ball videos, Golf ball reviews, and Golf Ball Articles. Then I file all my posts into one of those three.

Go to Design > widgets and add your Flexi Pages widget and categories widget if you haven’t done so yet. Label them something that makes sense.

Presto! Your phpbay site now functions like a real website.

I know this was a long post, but I hope it was helpful. Anyone else have another way of getting just one page on your homepage?

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