Problem: Set the order of my WordPress pages in the sidebar while using a template that disregards the Page Order property completely.

Solution: Add spaces to the beginning of page titles. More spaces results in a higher page order. Don’t worry, the extra spaces won’t actually appear on your blog.

Details: WordPress is great at getting a website online fast, but its quirks can be frustrating for new users (I’m a new user). Today I tried to reorder my my pages so that “Home” showed up before “About”. I tried setting the Page Order property in the page editor window, but that had no effect. So, I thought maybe a plugin would solve the problem. I installed My Page Order, only to find that that, too, had no effect. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure that My Page Order only sets the Page Order property of each page…

Oops: Well, I feel rather stupid. I was playing with my WordPress blog and discovered that the sidebar widget is what sets the page order. This was overriding the changes I made to the theme’s php…I guess I made that problem harder than it should have been…

My first code snippet:

Now that I finally have a simple, efficient way to post code snippets, I can start writing some Flash tutorials. I plan to document my own real-world experiences with ActionScript 3.0 on this blog. Hopefully this will save you (and a future me) a lot of time and frustration.

Problem: Add syntax highlighted code snippets to my WordPress blog.

Solution: SyHi. Read more »