Wordpress Show?

[willilance]

billreinicke: As far as changing the items in your sidebar (that's what the area on right side of your blog is called), there's an easy way and a hard way.

The hard way is to learn a bit of php and some of the specific wordpress functions and calls. That is a bit beyond a forum post However, if you're interested in figuring that out, here's the link to Wordpress' codex which covers their specific functions and calls. You would just search for what you want to change and change it in the sidebar.php file of your theme.

The easy way is to use Widgets. Widgets are kind of like little plugins for your sidebar. There are many default widgets (like categories, pages, calendar, meta, etc.), however your theme has to be set up to use them. Most of the new themes these days are set up with them. In order to modify how your sidebar looks using widgets, go to your Presentation or Appearance tab (depends on which version of Wordpress you are using) and find under that the Widgets tab or link. In there, you can add or remove different Widgets from your sidebar. You can also change the title and some other bits depending on the widget. So, in order to change your Meta section, you would add the Meta widget and then click on the edit button. From there you can put whatever you want for the Title and hit Done and then Save.

You can add or remove whatever widgets you want and once they are added, you can drag and drop to rearrange the order they show in. They're very cool

As far as setting up a main page in wordpress, yes you can and it's very easy:

Under General Settings, choose the Reading sub-option. Under that option you can choose to have your front page show Your Latest Posts or A Static Page. If you select the radio button next to A Static Page, you then just select a Page you have created as the Front Page. Save your changes and your homepage will show that page you selected instead of your listing of posts.

Whew, that was long

[tonyknuckles]

The reason having a show like this could be cumbersome and confusing. I've been using the WP platform as a self hoster since 2005 and have been thru many upgrades and plugin updates for those that follow these things. Keep in mind that every theme you see is not built or made useful for each upgrade. Also each plugin that you use must also be upgraded to work with latest tooling of the WP platform itself.

What I tell folks is to get an idea of a market scheme of what your blog will be about - pushing products or informational entry page to a more complex arena. The possibilities are pretty much limited to only how far you want to go with it.