Serendipity Forums

Hi, I'm a newbie on blogging and have just started using serendipity. I'm now confused on how to properly use the static page plugins. I installed the plugins and see that the new menu was listed on the sidebar in admin's area. I now have many questions listed below:

1. Will this static page plugins create me a new link to the newly created page?
2. What should I put on the "permalink" field?
3. What should I put on the "URL shorthand name (Backwards compatibility)"

I thought this plugins is suppose to be almost the same as the blog entries creation, since it also provided me the editor to add content to. After playing with it for a while, it seems that the plugins didn't create any page/link for me, so I'm wondering how to properly make use of it. Could anyone help explain this please? Thank you very much.

So, the static pages plugin creates a "static page" you can add to your blog.

That is, it is a page of html that will be displayed exactly like the rest of your blog (same theme, etc).

For example, say you wanted a page "About" you the author (commonly just called and About page...)

You would create a new static page.
Put "About Me!" in the headline.

Put the "page location" (if you are familiar with static html kinds of projects) in the permalink (more on this in a second): /pages/about.html

Put the subpage (used in older version of Serendipity and for the page identifier in the drop down: About

Pick an Article type (this determines what kind of template to use to display the text... greatly under utilized resource at the moment): Overview

Published status (published if you want people to be able to see it, draft otherwise): Published

Content: What ever you want.

That is a basic static page. Now what can you do with it?
Not much... But you can link to it and send your users there by using the url http://myblog.domain/pages/about.html (if you are using URL redirection) or http://myblog.domain/index.php?/pages/about.html (if you aren't using redirection).

Why is this cool? Well, it means you can create small to medium size static sites which all reside in the database... without having to mess with individual files, or trying to include template features in weird ways.

Hope that makes some sense?

Ok, specifics:

1. Will this static page plugins create me a new link to the newly created page?

No, not really. There is a static page sidebar plugin which will display a navigation menu for static links. You may want to play with it a little bit, but I think most people wind up using links in their theme.

2. What should I put on the "permalink" field?

Any directory/file combination you like. Some examples:
/pages/links.html or /projects/links.htm or /links.html or
/pages/about.html or /page_list/about.html or /misc/about.html

Etc... However, you should probably avoid permalinks serendipity uses already (like /archives, /categories, etc)

3. What should I put on the "URL shorthand name (Backwards compatibility)"

Here I usually use one word which best describes the page, but that is because I remember when this entry corresponded with something else (and I fear change ). From the testing I have done two words would work... But since they are used in the drop down menu I would suggest you keep them short and descriptive.

Hope that helps.

Thank you very much for your thorough answer. From what you've described, the plugin should create me the about.html page as well as create me the pages folder under serendipity folder, correct?

That's not my case, after I followed your direction, I see no new page created for me anywhere. I then tried using just /about.html instead of /pages/about.html in permalink field, but it still didn't create any page for me. After I saved the page, I tried to access that page using http://www.mysite.com/index.php?/about.html and http://www.mysite.com/about.html regardless of seeing no page created but none worked.

Not sure what I did wrong here. Please let me know if you have any idea. Thank you very much for your time and help.

Hi
after Matt's great description, there's not much to add.

You should be able to access the page at http://www.mysite.com/pages/index.php?about.html

HTH

Dave

From what you've described, the plugin should create me the about.html page as well as create me the pages folder under serendipity folder, correct?

Kind of... It doesn't actually create the page, or the directory on the webserver, and you wont be able to find the page using ftp or something like that. It just creates a permalink pointer in the database which serendipity uses to make it look like that page exists.

Now, as to why you can't access the page at http://www.mysite.com/index.php?/about.html, that is odd. So let's focus on that.

If you create the static page with the permalink /pages/about.html
You should be able to get to it with http://www.mysite.com/index.php?/pages/about.html

Um, ok, I had a thought... is your blog installed in a subdirectory? Like blog/ or seredipity/?

If so, you will have to try http://www.mysite.com/blog/index.php?/pages/about.html

Serendipity cannot control any webpage/directory outside of its installed directory. (I should have mentioned that last post, sorry.)

I installed serendipity on my root directory, so no sub-directory. I checked in mysql db and see that the entry was created and the "filename" field in that row has "none.html" in there. I'm not sure if that's related or not since I haven't specified any none.html in my entry.

I'm wondering if there's anything to do with the URL Rewriting in the admin's configuration since I have it disabled right now and I think my server doesn't support it. Not sure if there'll be a lot of broken link if I try to turn it on and since I'm not sure if it's related, so I haven't tried it yet.

Thanks again.

My entries all have filename equal to none.html, so I think that is fine.

As for rewrite, that was why I switch to talking about http://www.mysite.com/index.php?/pages/about.html. That url will work even without rewrite turned on.

Ok, so what I am left with for troubleshooting:
Are you sure the article is published?
(Can you tell I am running out of ideas? )

Um, does you permalink have the leading slash in the name?
ie, "/pages/about.html"

Or, do you have a url I can look at to see what is happening?

mgroeninger, I got it working now by using "/index.php?/pages/about.html" in permalink field. Thank you very much for your help. ^^