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September 8th, 2010

We need to sort out our navigational problems

In order to prepare ourselves for the expected onslaught of Christian Blog Award judges there are a few things that need to be sorted out. The first is the forward and back buttons on this website, which are currently in a state of disarray.

Take as an example this page and scroll down to the very bottom. The links say:

« Previous Page — « Previous Entries Next Entries » — Next Page »

This would be all very well, except that previous page leads you to the next entries, previous entries takes you to the next page, next entries takes you to the previous page, and next page takes you to the previous entries. It is a well known fact that 50% of all visitors are getting lost 50% of the times they click a link, and 50% of those have no idea whether they are the lost 50% or the other 50%. There are people who arrived on this site back in March who are still going backwards and forwards with little hope of respite.

The Judges (let’s capitalise, why not?) are going to be noting this kind of thing down in their noting-things-down books. Something needs to be done.

Worst of all, my arch-blogging-nemesis, the Church Mousse, has been taunting me.

If you are an expert in WordPress end-of-page links please scroll down to my technical plea. Everyone else: here are some proposals for replacement end-of-page links when this sorry saga can be sorted out.

navigational problems

Technical plea
Any advice from WordPress experts welcomed. I tried editing a page that contained one set of these end-of-page links, but doing so broke the blog. The duplication happened when I upgraded once. I use my own theme which is very outdated, but I like it. Anyone who can tell me which page I should edit would be profusely thanked.

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This is a single post on the Cartoon Blog by Dave posted on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 at 10:17 pm. Click here to read all of the latest posts. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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28 Responses to “We need to sort out our navigational problems”


  1. Miffy says:

    Dave, I’m intrigued;I had no idea that the Church includes deserts in its armoury. Does it flavour them according to the liturgical seasons? Lime for Ordinary Time, for example? Do explain.

    September 8th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
  2. Anne Madison says:

    My brain is mush because it’s 9:54 p.m. here and I’ve been working on somebody else’s WordPress blog since about 10 this morning. Moving from one version to the next of WordPress often breaks your permalinks, and that may be why you’re having problems. Off the top of my very addled head, I’d suggest looking at single_post.php. If you don’t find the culprit there, let me know, and I’ll think some more tomorrow morning (well, tomorrow afternoon for you) after I’ve slept a while.

    September 9th, 2010 at 3:00 am
  3. Mary R. says:

    Sorry I can’t help with technical stuff but I’m keeping up with 110% input! <

    September 9th, 2010 at 7:36 am
  4. Ed says:

    How about another binary duo – “somewhere” and “anywhere”?

    September 9th, 2010 at 8:53 am
  5. Gethin says:

    I suspect that part of the issue is that both “Previous entries” and “Next page” refer to older posts (as you have yours sorted with the newest at the top). I can’t help much with how to rename them without seeing your actual setup I’m afraid, although what Anne said is a good start – single_post.php or maybe single.php. Or it might be in a separate navigation.php page. There should be something along the lines of:


    [?php next_posts_link('LINK TEXT GOES HERE'); ?]
    [?php previous_posts_link('LINK TEXT GOES HERE'); ?]

    (with angle brackets instead of square), which you should be able to edit without too much worry, as long as you keep the text within the quote marks, bearing in mind that next_posts_link refers to older posts (“Previous entries”) and previous_posts_link refers newer (“Next entries”). Although if it’s an old template it might be done differently!

    And to think that people say that religion sometimes doesn’t make sense…

    September 9th, 2010 at 10:09 am
  6. Dave says:

    Anne / Gethin. Thank you – I appreciate the time taken to consider this. I will have a look at your suggestions when I get home (which probably won’t be until very late this evening – I may not even get onto it until first thing tomorrow morning).

    My own thinking was along the lines of the duplication possibly being to do with the WordPress installation putting in a set of forward/back links, and my peculiar theme putting in its own set of forward/back links, with the two using different logic to decide which is forward and which is back.

    September 9th, 2010 at 10:18 am
  7. Gethin says:

    In fact, looks like this might be the issue, the 4th post suggests how to fix it. Good luck!

    September 9th, 2010 at 10:35 am
  8. chris clark says:

    Another solution is to remove them :-)

    September 9th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
  9. Alastair Cutting says:

    How about: ?

    September 9th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
  10. Alastair Cutting says:

    Ooops – I have discovered if you use pointy brackets < what you write in the middle disappears (pesky xhtml)

    I was suggesting:

    Earlier …. Later

    September 9th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
  11. Clare says:

    …or to develop Alastair’s idea further, how about
    Earliers … Laters

    September 9th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
  12. Sara says:

    Can’t help with the code but in the spirit of giving 110% do you want me to point out a missing apostrophe (these things might matter to those lamppost lurking judges) or shall I just go back to the floristry? I like the idea of navigation via a link that says ‘Steady On,’ though. There probably aren’t enough of those.

    September 9th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
  13. Dave says:

    Chris – Removing things is the one thing you can’t do with code I’ve found. Computers get grumpy if any line, however pointless, isn’t there.

    Alastair / Clare – I’ve been thinking about ‘Starters… Mains …Afters’. No ideas what they would point to.

    Sara – Please do tell me. Blog Awards can be won or lost by a Jot or a Tittle.

    I do try with spelling, grammar, and punctuation – I really do. Am expecting criticism for the grammar in tomorrow’s Church Times cartoon. In the end I went with what sounded best in my head, even though it may be technically incorrect. The alternative sounded awkward.

    September 9th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
  14. Erika Baker says:

    How about: left a bit….. right a bit….. Aahhhh!

    September 9th, 2010 at 7:42 pm
  15. Dave says:

    Spent more than an hour on this and feeling utterly despondent.

    The ‘next entries / previous entries’ are in my theme, in the index.php and archive.php pages. I want to keep these.

    The utterly illogical ‘next page / previous page’ links, which point in the opposite direction than they should, are in wp-includes – link-template.php (somewhere around lines 1332 and 1442 but not exactly). I want to get rid of these, but:

    (a) Can I modify the core WordPress files
    (b) Surely any time I upgrade WordPress in the future it will bring them back.

    Advice welcomed.

    September 10th, 2010 at 10:41 am
  16. David Bunce says:

    Even if they’re in the core files, I would have thought they’d have to be called in the theme somewhere along the lines of in order to output.

    Another idea could be to download a vanilla version of your WordPress version and compare the core wordpress file that you think is the issue – could have been that it was upgraded and something went wrong

    September 10th, 2010 at 11:08 am
  17. Crimperman says:

    You are correct in your suspicions. Whilst you can do it I wouldn’t go altering the core WP code unless you want to get into a mess at update time.

    With regards the links this looks to me to be possibly related to your URL aliasing and not necessarily WP.

    The next page link here (http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/page/2/) points to the “next page number” which is http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/page/3 but this as you say points to the entry you previously entered. It seems that every time you add a new page WP makes that page 1 and shuffles the rest down.

    Perhaps a better URL system would be to use a date/name combo rather than numeric. So the first link I gave becomes “/blog/2010/07/cartoon-the sermon” and the second “/blog/2010/07/fantasy-tour-de-france”.

    As an earlier commenter says you can also specify anything in the link text including the page name. I use

    in my template which points to the previously posted page and the text reads “<< Post title".

    Hope that helps.
    Ryan (aka Crimperman)

    September 10th, 2010 at 11:11 am
  18. David Bunce says:

    Ooops sorry it didn’t output . . . I was thinking something along the lines of

    September 10th, 2010 at 11:24 am
  19. David Bunce says:

    Oh I give up on the outputting of php code . . . unless

    September 10th, 2010 at 11:25 am
  20. Dave says:

    Crimperman,

    Afraid I don’t really understand what you are saying – the page 1, 2,3 etc seems to work OK, whereas I don’t see why you would want to give pages (by ‘pages’ here I’m referring to groups of 10 posts) the names of individual posts.

    I’ve upgraded WordPress to 3.1. No change, but then there wouldn’t be as it must be the theme that is the problem somehow.

    There must be something I can do to my theme to stop it bringing in these additional links, but I really don’t know what it is. My ‘We Blog Cartoons’ site does it all just fine, so why not this one? I’d pay someone, but it’s currently looking like removing two links is the sort of job that is going to take a long time = ie £££. I’ve spent 3 hours and still can’t work it out.

    September 10th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
  21. Dave says:

    Sorry, I mean 3.0.1.

    Thanks again to all who have tried to help. Run out of time for this week now unfortunately.

    September 10th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
  22. Gethin says:

    Dave,

    You *should* be able to fix this just in index.php and archive.php, without touching any of the core files that will get replaced if you upgrade again.

    How are the links written out in these files – do they use “posts_nav_link” or “next_posts_link” and “previous_posts_link”, or something entirely different?

    If they use “posts_nav_link” then you should only need that once, in the form of:

    post_nav_link('','Next Entries »','« Previous Entries')

    whereas it sounds like you might have:

    posts_nav_link('','','« Previous Entries');
    posts_nav_link('','Next Entries »','');

    Does that make any kind of sense compared to what you have?

    September 10th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
  23. Peter Ould says:

    The “Previous Entries” and “Next Entries” links work absolutely fine. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what you’re trying achieve with the “Previous Page” and “Last Page” links – drop them.

    September 10th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
  24. Dave says:

    Peter – I’d love to drop them. Do tell me how! They (somehow) come from the WordPress core files, not from the theme. I don’t want to mess around with these, as every time I upgrade they will go wrong again.

    September 10th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
  25. Dave says:

    Gethin – Thank you. I will check when I get to my home computer again.

    September 10th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
  26. Peter Ould says:

    Email me admin details for your site (an admin login account for the wp site and perhaps FTP details in case I need to make the theme files writeable) and I’ll look at it for you. WP and me are pretty cool mates…

    September 10th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
  27. Dave says:

    I’m now considering getting someone to do more than just this on the template. I’m thinking I’d quite like it widgetised for instance. Will post more on this another day.

    Peter – very kind of you, thanks for the offer. I need to not look at it again today as I must get work done. Don’t have ftp details with me in any case. May come back to you (probably next week) if that’s OK, depending.

    September 10th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
  28. Peter Ould says:

    Dave,

    Both of those things you mention are not very big jobs.

    P+

    September 11th, 2010 at 6:30 pm