I am trying to turn this site, TobiasTenney.com, to do what I assumed were very basic things. I have made the wrong assumption that even though we do not have jetpacks, we should have easy access to a CMS that does all of the basic user desired modularity without having to get your hands dirty with CSS or PHP. (I can, but I don’t think I should have to.)
I want to have tabs at the top that then present a filtered view of my blog. I want “Video” to present you with all of my blog entries that I tagged or categorized as “video”. I also want to have a “Why I am Writing About Video” page that is included in this. The problem seems to be that I can add tabs that are “Pages”, but pages act like a static single entry. I could instead use “Categories”, but categories lack the functionality to be helpful (they seem to just show a dumb list of titles placed into the categories).
Here is the best example:
I would like to have “Audio” as a main tab with a drop down menu with my bands. I currently made sites for all of these:
•Audio (parent)
–Specimen (child)
–Plastination (child)
The above works out great, except for one thing. The “Audio” page does not include all of my audio related blog posts which can be seen by clicking on the Audio category.
Living in the future, but with no blogging jetpack to be had.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This is definitely not a Thesis issue it's a WordPress issue. It would be relatively easy to create a page (yes a page) that has a custom query built into it that will filter by tags. So you could have a "Video" page that only displays posts tagged with "Video". One thing to keep in mind is that tags are free form and have no hierarchy. You can't have a tag that is a child of another tag like you can with categories.
I have a similar situation on my site. I use a membership plugin that restricts access to some of the video on my site to paid subscribers. I use tags to differentiate between those two. That way a given category can have both free and premium videos under it.
I don't have the need to have a page that filters by tag, but I do have several plugins that show latest free videos, latest premium videos that use the tag filter. I use the "Featured Tag" widget by Andrea Developer for this. You might find that the "Query Posts" widget by Justin Tadlock will do the same.
Anyway, I just posted a video tutorial on my blog that addresses a condition similar to it that you could use as a basis for figuring it out. The tutorial is based on Thesis 1.6 and WordPress 2.9.
Many thanks for the pointers.
I think I was hoping that if Thesis doesn't do this now, maybe they can do in a future release.
I have been hand coding for almost…*mumble*…years and find it odd that these sort of things aren't automated. Land of the jetpack fuel, but no jetpacks.
You should consider looking into Wordpress taxonomies. Justin Tadlock's website has some good information on them.
Based on both you and Rick, I think I'm going to have to really dig into Justin Tadlock's website.
I was hoping to keep my hands clean, but I think I'll have to don on some latex gloves, lift up the rug, and draw some PHP in the dust.