Stuck and confused setting up folders / permalinks.

I have searched, I have tried creating folders and I’m just not sure what I’m doing now.

I want to use grav as a personal blog.

domain.com is fine.

domain.com/actual-page is fine
domain.com/actual-page-2 is fine
The permalinks for the above are exactly what I would expect - it’s the page title in the url.

The issue is posts.

At domain.com I have a post.
Because I have hidden posts that came with the theme (which is Quark Open Publishing), this post has the folder name 24.cat
The full path is
pages/01.blog/24.cat

Home page is set to blog
Hide home route in URLs is Yes

At domain.com I can see the post excerpt and the image featured in that post (I edited the template to get the result there I wanted). So the front page is good.

When I click the post title though I get sent to
domain.com/cat

Desired result:
I get sent to
domain.com/april/cat

I tried creating the folder april, moving the post there and changing it’s location in admin but that didn’t work.
I have tried changing various settings/options in site admin to no avail.
When I search the forum here I see a solution involving regex but that’s beyond my knowledge.

I have 2 questions:

  1. What do I need to do in site admin / templates / ftp to make my post appear at domain.com/april/cat ?
    And then domain.com/may/dog and so on.

  2. Do I need to use ftp to create a folder for each month? Or if I specify /month-name somewhere in site admin does that get created automatically?

Thanks for reading