WordPress – How to assign categories and tags to pages
December 11, 2011 update: Before you read this article, you should know I now consider it unnecessary. Because of new feature of custom menus from WordPress version 3, a post can be assigned to a menu item among page menu items. Therefore there is no reason to do what I outlined before. 🙂
From quite a while ago I’ve been wondering if there was a way to assign a category and tags to WordPress pages. There is no apparent option to do this in WordPress. Posts have the capability to be assigned categories and tags, but pages have no such option. Besides this, I wanted to have long articles added as pages to both appear in the top page menu and yet also have them appear as titles of new posts in the sidebar menu widget.
One of my projects is http://starsandpearls.com/ The short articles were add as posts, but some of the long articles, the “E-zines”, are laid out in a magazine format with its own internal menu. If you go to the site and put your mouse over the “Stars and Pearl E-zine” menu item, you will see the menu drop down with menu items that all point to pages. And yet you will find 6 of the same menu titles also in the Recent Posts side bar menu! How did I do it?
First of all, you need to install the “Page Links to” plugin from http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/page-links-to/ or by entering the words
page links to
in the Install Plugins search option.
After you install the plugin, go to Posts – Add New, and you will see toward the bottom of each edit post dialog area the following:
First you make your page and publish it. Then you copy the full URL from the location bar into the clipboard. Then you make a post by the same name, assign a category and tags to it, and then paste the URL of the page you created into the “Point to this URL:” of the Page Links To section of the edit post area. You also might want to copy the first couple paragraphs of the page into the post with a Continue Reading code at the end. Either clicking on the title in the posts section or clicking on the continue reading hyperlink will take you to the full page.
I’m posting this because after Googling for the answer to this question, I haven’t found any solution as simple to implement as the one I’m giving you now. 🙂
The two column dropdown menu was made with the aid of “Uber Menu”, a very useful WordPress plugin to make mega menus.