The Basics of Writing Posts and Pages in WordPress
July 6, 2008 – 12:00 pmPutting content into WordPress is very intuitive. You login, and navigate to the Write tab, type out what you want and press publish. However, there are tons of options that you can use to push the limits of WordPress to your benefits.
The difference between posts and pages
A post and page are basically the same thing in WordPress. WordPress even stores them in the same place, but they have different uses and options.
A page is:
Pages, on the other hand, are for content such as “About Me,” “Contact Me,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present information about yourself or your site that is somehow timeless — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any amount of content. (from: WordPress Pages)
A post is:
Posts are the entries that display in reverse chronological order on your home page. In contrast to pages, posts usually have comments fields beneath them and are included in your site’s RSS feed. (from: WordPress: Writing Posts)
So, you make posts for things that come up over time. Things like news articles, things you want to talk about, business updates, etc. Whereas, pages you would use for content that doesn’t change often.
The basics of using the editor toolbar
I suggest that you make a post or a page, and then try all of these options to see what they do. Also, you will want to “preview” the post on your actual site, to see what these options look like when they are rendered with your style sheet.
A good example of this for me, is that some templates I have found have forgotten to add CSS elements for bolding, italics, and/or blockquotes. It is nice to know your limitations, or at least what you will have to go in and add when you get your site going. On this site, the original template had no size difference between different types of headers. The h1, h2, and h3 headers were all the same size. This was severely limiting to the organization of the page, so I have updated the stylesheet.
When you go to write your posts and page content, you have many options for formatting your content. You will notice that the buttons look a lot like your typical word editor. The options that are shown by default (from left to right):
First Row:
Add an Image - gives you a dialog for uploading a images. You can choose multiple files from your computer, or an individual item from a website to upload. Once they are uploaded, you will have many options for how to show the image on your site. If you don’t want your images to be inline with the text, but to just show the thumbnails for your images, you can use the gallery tag.
Add video - gives you a dialog for uploading a video. Once you have the file uploaded, you get options for how you want the video to be placed in your content. This includes options like the player to use.
Add Audio - gives you a dialog for uploading audio. Works very similar to the video player.
Add Media - gives you a dialog for uploading media. I am convinced that this is a catch-all uploader, for anything else that you would like to upload to the page.
Visual Editor Tab - Show the word editor interface with the options that are shown in the above picture.
HTML Editor Tab - Show the HTML editor interface. On this screen, you will see all the HTML tags that the visual editor produces around your text when you use the options from above. There are options here for editing the text, but it is limited.
Second Row:
Bold - makes text bold
Italic - makes text italic
Strikethrough - makes text have strikethroughs
- Bullets
- Ordered List
Blockquote
Left Justify Left Justify Left Justify Left Justify
Centered Centered Centered Centered
Right Justify Right Justify Right Justify Right Justify
Break a Link - removes the HTML for a link from previously linked text
Insert an image - Puts an image directly into the text, from a URL. This is much less functional from the Add an Image uploader functionality that I talked about above.
More tag - Puts a break in your page so your whole post doesn’t show on the homepage of your website. Use this for long posts to keep your homepage from being very cluttered.
Check Spelling - Check the spelling in your post. (I should use this more…We all should)
Toggle Full Screen - Makes the visual editor go to full-screen mode, or back to normal.
Show/Hide Kitchen Sink - This will show and hide the extra options for editing. I will discuss this in a future article called Advanced Posting In WordPress.
Next Article: More WordPress Posting Basics
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