Pagination remains mysterious

Question

This is probably a newbie question...

I have a blog of fifty entries, and I want to be able to have people click through them using previous/next links, but I also want people to have random access to all of them in a sidebar menu.

I have a standard pagination tag pair:

 {paginate}
   <p style="text-align:right">     {if previous_page}
            <a href="{auto_path}">Previous Page</a> &nbsp;
        {/if}
         {if next_page}
            <a href="{auto_path}">Next Page</a>
        {/if}
        </p>
    {/paginate}

inside a standard channel entries pair:

{exp:channel:entries channel="md" limit="1" disable="member_data" orderby="author_last" sort="asc"  paginate="top" } ...

And it works--but only because I start the series with a hard-coded link to a 'P1' pagination style link.

However, I also have a full menu of all entries in a sidebar using the channel entries tag and urls thusly:

{exp:channel:entries channel="md" orderby="author_last" sort="asc" disable="member_data" dynamic="no" }  
<p>{author_last}: <a href="{url_title_path="md/post"}">{title}</a></p>...

With the result that if a person clicks on any of the entries from the sidebar menu, pagination links disappear.

Is there any way to have it both ways?

thanks

Answer 1

If you are just showing one entry, try prev-next entry linking instead of pagination https://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/add-ons/channel/entry_linking.html