Do I need an empty page for a different blog page?

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Okay, let’s say I have a website with the following navigation:

HOME – ABOUT – PRODUCT – NEWS – CONTACT

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The ‘about’ and ‘contact’ page are just simple pages of course.
The ‘product’ page is just an archive of a custom post type. Nothing special over there.

Then there’s just the ‘home’ and ‘news’ page.
If I make a page called ‘home’, I can than go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Reading’ and set a static page as front page.

But now I would like the ‘news’ page to be the ‘default’ posts overview. But somehow, I’ve never found a way to make this work without creating an empty paged called ‘news’ or something and go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Reading’ again, and set this page as the posts page.

But now I have an empty page inside the pages overview, and I don’t really want that page. Clients try to put stuff in there and email me that it doesn’t show up and stuff like that.

So question is, do you really need to create an empty page just to set that page as the posts page/blog page?

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3 comments

  1. So question is, do you really need to create an empty page just to set that page as the posts page/blog page?

    Yes, you do.

    If you use a static front page, and want to have a page for (blog) posts, then you need to create a separate static page, and assign it as “page for posts” in Settings -> Reading.

    But now I have an empty page inside the pages overview, and I don’t really want that page. Clients try to put stuff in there and email me that it doesn’t show up and stuff like that.

    Note that WordPress is addressing some of your UI concerns.

  2. Somewhat tangential to the main question, which Chip answered, but you can display that content if you want to. In the template file that is generating your index, add: 

    $pobj = get_queried_object();
$bp = get_post($pobj->ID);
var_dump($bp); // dump the page content

    This is very minimal code and will need to be fitted to your theme in more than a few ways, but it is one to address your client complaints.

  3. But now I have an empty page inside the pages overview, and I don’t
    really want that page. Clients try to put stuff in there and email me
    that it doesn’t show up and stuff like that.

    Yes, it is an annoyance having that empty page. I usually put content on that page – I’ll say something like, “Any text you enter here will not actually show up on the site: this page is just a placeholder for the blog page. If you want to create a new blog post, click on Posts –> Add New.”

    I agree that it’s not ideal from a UI standpoint, but on the other hand it makes it easy to put the blog page in custom menus. Putting the text in the page with instructions seems to help.