“Posts” and “pages” are very similar. They both contain text, images, and links, but they have slightly different roles:
- Posts appear on your home page, in the archive, and in your blog’s RSS feed
- A link to a page will appear in the site navigation at the top of every page on the site
Common uses for pages include:
- A description of your site, who you are, what a visitor might expect from this blog — ex., “About”
- Information about contacting you via Twitter, by email, or some other means
If pages don’t seem necessary for your blog, that’s okay!
Creating a page
Let’s say you want to add an About page to your new blog.
Like posts, pages are created and managed in your blog’s Portway project.
- Click or tap the + button at the top of the Documents sidebar
- Enter the title for your page — About
Next, insert a new String field named type with the value page:
See Using fields for details on inserting fields into a Portway document
This field is what distinguishes a page from a post when your blog is being built. If it’s missing, or doesn’t have the correct name or value, the document will be published as a post.
Other page metadata
There are a couple of other page properties you can manage using Portway fields.
navigation
You may not want all your pages to appear in the site’s navigation bar.
To remove a page from the navigation, add a String field anywhere in your Portway document with the name navigation and the value false:
sort
By default, pages will appear from left to right in the site’s navigation in the order they were created.
To customize the sort order, add a Number field anywhere in your Portway document with the name sort and the desired position in the site navigation:
That’s a wrap!
At this point, hopefully you’ve successfully deployed your new site, published your first blog post, and created a new About page.
Don’t miss these other quick guides for configuring your site!
- Set a few theme options for your blog’s header and footer
- Customize blog post metadata, like pinning a post or setting a custom excerpt
- Create a second deployment to expose simple admin features
If you ran into any hiccups or snags getting up and running, please let me know!