Blog excerpts on blog page which groups articles by subject matter

[hayleydk13 0]

My blog currently has blog excerpts with a thumbnail on its homepage. I have navigation tabs to pages that group the articles from the blog by subject. Right now, I have links to the relevant articles on each page. But, I'd prefer to have blog article excerpts plus thumbnail instead. For example, on my page titled "Phishing" I have several links to all previous articles that talk about "Phishing." 1) How do I get article excerpts like those on the home page (perhaps with fewer lines in the excerpt on the home page) instead of just links? 2) Is there a way to auto-populate those pages based on subject matter? My email address is hayley "at" what-is-privacy.com in case additional clarification is needed. I have tried downloading a plug-in for excerpts but I still couldn't find a way to get the same content as what posts on my home page. The plug-in seemed to be a way to handcraft each excerpt. Thanks so much for any help. Hayley

[Rob 547]

Hayley, first, for your protection, I'm editing your email address from the post above because this forum is searchable via any search engine. Next, there's a fantastic plugin called Special Recent Posts. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/special-recent-posts/ You go to Dashboard > Pages > Add New. Create a totally blank page and call it 'News" or "Blog". Don't put anything in the editing area, but you should select a template you like. Save the page. Back to Add New, create a new one called "Home". In this, you may wish to add a little blurb describing basically what your site is about (optional). Below that, set up some headings for the categories you want to group the posts into. The instructions for Special Recent Posts (SRP) include some of the various shortcode tags you can use to custom-craft your own shortcode. Then, under let's say the Phishing category, you add a shortcode specific to that category (uses the Phishing category ID #) with the number of posts you want to display for that category. One note, you can also add thumbnails, but they default to the PageLines thumbnail size for magazine mode. You can us CSS to easily identify the thumbnail for SRP and resize and align it as you wish. Repeat the process for each category. In your menu, create a link to your Blog or News page we created earlier, which will eventually show all your posts (without category structure). Now, go to Dashboard > Settings > Reading and select "Static" from the options, then using the bottom drop down, select that blog or news page, and in the top one select the Home page we created. Save your settings. In each of your posts, you can either use SRP again, OR, you can try some of the spectacular related posts plugins available from http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins. Many of these are similar to ones found on sites like CNN.com.