"Your homepage displays" setting missing without explanation

[paulpela]

When there are no available pages, ie. no pages exist or there are only pages marked as private, the "Your homepage displays" setting isn't showing up at all in Settings >> Reading. There's no explanation why it's not available currently.

Possible fix: provide a short piece of info on why this option isn't currently available.

[audrasjb]

Can't reproduce the issue when no page exist

[audrasjb]

Hello and welcome to WordPress Trac!

If the option is not available, I wouldn't personally display it at all.
I don't think we have any other Setting that is displaying such a message when the option is not available… but worth asking the question, indeed :-)

[SergeyBiryukov]

Hi there, welcome to WordPress Trac! Thanks for the ticket.

Just noting this was previously reported in #15208, #21345, #25456.

Some solutions were explored and extensively discussed in #16379.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #38164

[conversernz]

Making this option appear and disappear because the user either has or has not any pages is a contravention of basic user interface design principles for GUI applications. Making a piece of a user interface visible or hidden depending on a setting in a completely different part of the user interface is bad because it is counter-intuitive. The key principle for design of GUI applications is that a user can see what is happening or is going to happen when they take an action. Since the part where pages are added and deleted is different from the part where the page is selected as a static home page or blog post page, this is not possible to achieve.

You should only ever do this with a setting in the same part of the user interface as the part that is displayed or hidden. For example, the homepage settings could be incorporated into the Pages settings page where pages are added and deleted.

The reason it is bad with the current interface is a person who is new to WordPress and has deleted all their pages before reaching the part of the user interface that enables the homepage settings will never see it and therefore they will never know it exists. Saying you should read the documentation ignores that GUI user interfaces are supposed to be designed to be intuitive.

Since the Homepage Settings page provides an option to add a new page to remedy the problem of there not being a page to set as the static home page or blog posts page, it is completely unnecessary to hide the Homepage Settings page or the section that appears in Settings -> Reading. No fault is going to occur if the user does not have any pages available to be set in these settings areas. They will realise they have to add a page and the Add Page link will let them do it.

[mrfoxtalbot]

I was going to report this exact issue. If you try to set up a static homepage but there are no published pages you will just not see this option at all:

I would like to see an option to create the page right from the customizer or at least some kind of direction for the users: