Ok, it’s apparently my day for beating my head against the wall. Just so that maybe I can prevent someone else from doing the same, I’ll share this little tidbit about splitting a long post into multiple pages on WordPress. I’m sure the long-time bloggers know how to do this, but I’m a newbie at this and sure couldn’t find a complete explanation anywhere.
What I wanted to accomplish is to simply break up a post into pages on the homepage since it was kind of long. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong! Firstly, I looked at the toolbar to the built in editor – you know the one:
Great, nifty, but where is the page break? Maybe it’s that cool one at the top, five from the right that looks like two sheets of paper. Sounds good, let’s do that. Typetity, typetity, I come up with this:
More? Funny tag name, but what the hey. Let’s preview and see what we get.
Not exactly what I was looking for…
Try again. A little research gives me the <!–nextpage–> tag. While there’s no button for this on the toolbar – don’t ask me, I’d find it useful – it can be inserted by doing a SHIFT-ALT-P in the visual tab of the editor or manually typed in in the HTML tab. Score! That’s gotta be what I want! A little editing, and now I have this:
Gotcha now! Let’s preview!
Sweet! Perfect! Now publish it and check the website just to be certain…
Wha-hunh? Ok, now I’m confused. Where did all the cool page numbers go? Where did the rest of the content go, for that matter? No site or search I did led me to any answer on why this wasn’t working, so I had to figure it out myself. Here’s what I came up with eventually. All the pieces are there, we just have to combine them. Like this:
Note the original “more” tag has been added above the first page break. That at least gives us a “click to read more” message on the front page. Sorry, I never have figured out how to put the page numbers on the front page, if indeed this is possible. The result is this:
Clicking on the “Continue reading” then gives us our page numbers:
If anyone knows how to get the page numbers on the homepage, I’d love to hear. Until then, this at least keeps my large posts from cluttering the homepage!
