Yesterday I posted an article on Office Open XML which is too long for a blog entry. Rather than creating a separate HTML file I used a WordPress page entry. WordPress pages are authored in the same way as blog posts, but are not part of the blog itself; they “live outside of the normal blog chronology.” You can organize them into a hierarchy of pages and sub-pages; they are important because they make it possible to build an entire web site in WordPress, using it as a simple content management system.

Curiously the page template in many WordPress themes omits comments. This caught me out: I marked the page as enabled for comments, but no comment form appeared. I fixed this by adding the following line to page.php:

<?php comments_template(); ?>

I’m now happy with the result and will probably use WordPress for further longer articles. In fact, I’ve already added a further page, this being my blog archive. When I migrated from bBlog to WordPress, I left the old blog engine in place so as not to break existing incoming links. However, although the old entries were still in place, most were left with no index link; they were effectively invisible. The new archive page fixes this; you can see all the posts since I started blogging in 2003: errors, insights and all.