(Now that I have at least some way of hiding the development blog posts from the home page, I want to document this here.)
I learned today that if we want a Post Category and an Event Category to be able to share the exact same “slug” (short name), like “womensministry”, when we first create that Event Category, it must have exactly the same name and the same slug as the Post Category.
If we do that, the two will share what WordPress calls a “term”, and then if either of them changes that Category’s name or slug in the future, both will change together.
I believe this is what we want, and the Ministry page template that I created (called Page plus Posts) assumes the same short-name for both the Posts and Events.
If the Event Category is created with a different name or slug initially, you can’t change it back to share the same slug (term) later. This is why we couldn’t rename the Event Category womensministry-2 to womensministry. So instead, I created a new Event Category that matched exactly, moved the existing events over to it, and deleted the original one.
I also pre-created the LIFE Event Category so I could ensure the problem didn’t happen with that one.