Okay this is very geeky. And I’m not really a geek. So I’m in territory that’s far beyond the edges of my understanding. I may have this wrong. But as of tonight I got WordPress to do what I wanted to. So there.

How do I get WordPress to display everything in my website tagged “publications” AND “employability”?

After looking for “WordPress multiple tags” allover the place I realized my novice self was not even searching for the right terms. What I should have been looking for is “WordPress taxonomy intersections unions” (e.e.: always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question). Sounds kinda kinky if you ask me. Here’s what I’ve found on this so far (see especially this, with a comment from Jeremy, nice!). The important part:

• INTERSECTION
  http://www.yoursite.org/?tag=publications,employability
  http://www.yoursite.org/tag/publications,employability/
  — either of these return posts with the tags publications OR employability
• UNION
  http://www.yoursite.org/?tag=publications+employability
  http://www.yoursite.org/tag/publications+employability/
  — either of these return posts with the tags publications AND employability

Annoying thing is, it won’t tell you so at the top of the page. It will appear as if it is just returning posts with the first tag. If I understand correctly there’s a way to fix this by messing around with the wp-includes/canonical.php. But that’s waaaaay beyond my PHP skillz (!).

So… in the interim I found this nice little plugin. It’s odd but works for now displaying the union of two tags, and you can specify that it shows just what is in a particular category. Example

• All content tagged publications and employability:
  http://yoursite.org/?tdo_tag=publications+employability/
• Just content in resources category tagged publications and employability:
  http://yoursite.org/category/resources/?tdo_tag=publications+employability/

accros within a category. It may not be scalable. But it will do for my dev site until I have everything figured out enough to hire a proper programmer.

PS. Please don’t add comments to this post asking for more details. A bunch of you did that last time I posted something I learned on WordPress. Truth is: I don’t know. I’m muddling through this stuff too!

1. Create a page with the title the same as the address you want for the blog. Usually “Blog” but it could be anything, like “Discussion Area” which would become “discussion-area” in the URL.

2. Go under “Settings” and then “Reading”. You’ll see at the top that you have a pulldown to decide which existing page (so create it first) you want to use as frontpage and which page you want to use for the blog (“Posts Page”). It’s a bit dumb because the page you tell it to use as the “Posts Page” won’t ever be shown, you just create it so you can use its URL for your blog posts.

Worked like a charm. I set the home page (frontpage) to “About”. You could also create a page called “Home” and then link to that. If you want to hide the page name you’ll have to do it in the theme — when I figure out how will let you know.