In this article, we will clarify how the post works in WordPress, how it is different from pages, and how to create, format, and make changes in posts. We will walk through understanding the categories and tags, their usage, and how to publish and schedule posts.
In the initial stage, when WordPress was founded, we could only create posts. WordPress contains 3 major items; Posts, pages, and media items.
What is a post?
The post is the primary content in WordPress that comprises text, images, an image gallery, video, an audio file, and documents. Post can be on any topic you want to publish online and others need access to it through a URL. The post should be more or less a regular update that is part of a stream of published material.
In WordPress sites, posts can be sorted by categories and tags. It can be searched according to any specific date or time, or if it is published by any specific author.
Difference between posts and pages in WordPress
- Now, as you know posts are regular updates published in a stream of data, and pages are published as standalone objects.
- Posts are organized based on categories and tags, date time, and author, pages are organized based on Parent/child relationships.
- Posts are generally current, rational, and ephemeral whereas pages are fixed and static.
- Posts are those pieces that you publish like on social media sites, portfolio items, newspapers, and magazines, pages have content that is always there on your site unless you remove it.
- For example; pages have information about the product and services of a company with the contact details and that information is always there.
How does the post-editor view work?
On the top, you will see that we have the Title field. Here you would enter the title of the post.
Next, we have the Content Editor where you can write text and add images and other media content. The Content Editor has a toolbar that allows you to edit text like you would in a regular word-processing application.
On the right-hand column at the top, you will see the Publish panel where the status of the post can be changed from Draft to Publish, and the publishing date and time of any post are managed.
Creating a new post in WordPress
We can create a new post in WordPress either from the WordPress toolbar or from the admin panel.
You can create a post from the backend admin panel. You can hover over Posts and select “Add New”. And this takes you to the new post editor. You can add your title there.
WordPress will automatically generate a permalink for us. After that, we can click on Edit to change the permalink.
This post will be automatically saved as a draft in WordPress. That means even if you navigate away from the post or close your browser or anything else, WordPress will remember the changes.
You can always go to the Admin menu and click on ‘All Posts’ and there you will find your draft.
Creating and formatting your first post
This process always begins with adding a title. After adding your title, you can start writing content in the content editor. Because WordPress works as a word processing application, you can write your posts directly into the interface, or in any other application on your computer or online.
By default, the content editor toolbar has one row and a second row of tool buttons. The first button I want to talk about is on the second row and it’s the one you’ll use every time you want to copy and paste content into WordPress. It could be from the web, from a document, or from somewhere else. The button with the question is this clipboard here triggers the Paste as text function. Once you click Paste as text, the contents will now be pasted in as plain text until you toggle this option off.
Now you can go to any website or document you’ve created before, copy the content, and paste it in without having to worry about styling.
You might have a different style and size of the texts in your document in the drive where you copy from, that will not be the same when you paste it into the WordPress site.
You can organize your headings and subheadings depending on the hierarchies within your content.
You can mark your text in bold or italic size, you can add bullet points or numerics based on your content. You will also see an ordered list and an unordered list. You can create this list with the items in your content.
Next on the toolbar, you will see a quotation mark that marks a Block Quote, there’s a quote that’s supposed to look different from the rest of the content. We have a feature specifically for this purpose in HTML and the feature is hidden under the Quote button called Block Quote. You can place your cursor anywhere within a paragraph. Now, click the Block Quote button, and that text is broken out and made into a Pull Quote within your article. It’s styled differently and displayed differently, telling the viewer this text has been pulled out just like in a newspaper article to highlight it and they’ll continue being separate from the rest of your content.
The next three buttons are for text alignment. Technically you can align your text right, center, or left. However, your theme will do this job for you. Be careful using these features and make sure you preview any of your changes before committing them to a live post.
Creating and editing links
You can create links in WordPress, both through content on the wider web and also to content within your site. Now how to add, edit, and remove links has been changed in WordPress.
You need to copy the link URL, Control or Command + C, then go to the WordPress Editor in your post or page, and highlight the content you want to turn into a link. It could be a single word, a sentence, an image, or anything else. Then you can right-click and paste the URL.
This creates a link automatically for us and there is this nice tooltip that tells us exactly where we are pointing with this link. If you click on the link, you can go directly to that link to make sure it works. And if you want to edit the link, you can click the edit button. This opens the URL field for editing, so there you can change the link if you want to, and if you want to make further edits you can also click the wheel there, link options, that opens the Insert/edit link dialogue from which you can change the URL, change the link text, so that is the display text in the post or page, and most importantly you can toggle this Open link in a new tab box on and off.
When you click on the link with a feature highlight on the WordPress toolbar, there you have a button that relates to links, Insert/edit link that will take us directly to the tooltip. Now Remove link works the same as the X inside the link tooltip. It simply takes the link away.
Now, in the first row, the last button is the toolbar toggle, which opens the second row. We have a button called the Horizontal line. It adds a horizontal line in your content which shows that there is a separation between the stuff that went before the line, and the stuff that comes after.
After the Horizontal line, we have Text color, which works the same as Bold and Italic size. You can simply highlight some text, and pick a color as per your requirement.
Another is an eraser button. You can highlight some content that has been styled in some way and then click on the Eraser button. This is a simple way of removing formatting if you’ve accidentally applied it.
Now, if you do this by accident, and you want to return to where you were, you can click the ‘Undo’ button, and this will bring back the features you just removed. Click it and you’ll get a modal pop-up with special characters where you can pick and insert any kind of special character or icons you don’t have on your keyboard.
Next to special characters, we have two indentation buttons, Decrease indent, and Increase indent. This is helpful when you’re working with nested lists.
We also have Undo, and Redo, which can be controlled with either Control Command + Zed for Undo or Control Command + Y for Redo.
You can also click on the Question mark, to get a full breakdown of all the available keyboard shortcuts and many hidden shortcodes in the editor. These shortcuts will make writing and editing content easy. Once you’ve finished styling your content in the WYSIWYG editor, you can have a look by switching to Text view. You will get the actual raw code the browser uses to format and style your content. For every piece of content you’ve styled, the browser sees a tag.
Now you can also start adding images and other media elements to your posts and align them. Once all your content is styled as you like, move your mouse out of the editor field to see all the other panels. Then go to the Publish field, and click on Preview. This will open a preview of your post on the front end, that only you can see, and here, you will see the content is styled the way you set it up.
So now you know how to create your post and style the content within that post using the content editor.
Now let’s know about the categories and tags. Whenever you are working on posts you are already dealing with categories and tags. Tag in this case is not compulsory.
What are the differences between categories and tags?
- Categories are meant for grouping your posts based on several topics whereas tags are meant to describe specific details on your post.
- Categories help identify what your blog post is about and tags are treated as the microdata that micro-categorizes your content.
- Categories assist the readers in finding the right type of content they are searching for and tags are the index words of your content.
Using categories and tags
Adding categories and tags to your posts is done by the Post editor. Categories are mandatory, they appear first in the right-hand sidebar. You only have one category called Uncategorized. Every post must belong to a category, and WordPress doesn’t know anything about how you want to organize your content. So Uncategorized is the only option.
If you don’t assign a category to your posts, it will always automatically be set to the default category, which is uncategorized. Now, Uncategorized is not a good category to use. So, you need to make new categories.
You can add a category by simply clicking the Add New Category button under the main Categories list. Once you are done giving a name to the category, you can Add New Category. It automatically gets added in and floated up to the top of your list.
There could be parent-child relationships between your posts. Again you can work depending on the hierarchy.
As you start using your site and categorizing more posts, you can see a curated list of your categories there.
Tags are quite different. They’re free and text-based. You can type in whatever tag you want to apply to your post, and a comma separates them. And then you can add them in bulk. If the tag you type in already exists, you’ll see that WordPress will try to help you by showing the existing categories they’ve already created. WordPress says nothing if you add anything. You can click on Add after you have added your comma-separated list of tags. Now you can see all of these tags appear down underneath. If you want to remove them, you have to click the little red x next to each of the tags to take them away.
Tags are case-sensitive. When you’re making tags, make sure that you’re consistent with how you write them. Try to use existing tags rather than constantly adding new ones, that look almost the same.
Once you have added categories and tags, you can click Save Draft. Your post now has both categories and tags.
Publishing and scheduling posts
Once you are done with the post creation and editing, you can simply go ahead with publishing your post.
From the section, you can Publish, Schedule, and Update your post, as well as move it to Trash. If you are in the draft post and you click it, the post will go live right at that moment and the button will change to Update.
Posts can be published immediately or can be saved to draft, as you want to recheck later before publishing, scheduled by any month, date, and time, and once chosen to schedule, WordPress clock will automatically live it on your behalf.
But you can always modify the publishing date even if the post is published. You can also change the Status manually. Click this Edit button and then use the drop-down, to Pending Review or Draft. Once you change the Status and Update the post, the post is taken off the front end of the website and is marked as “Pending Review”.
You can also choose to set the post Visibility to Password protected, in which case you have to enter a Password, and whoever wants to see it needs to enter that same password. You can also set a post to Private, wherein only logged-in users will be able to see the post.
These options are less commonly used. It is generally used only for membership sites or sites that share personal content or content for small groups. Otherwise, you will only be using the Save Draft, Preview, and Publish buttons from within the Publish panel.
But if you have a post created, finalized, and published, it will be available immediately to the front end of your site for public view.
This chapter is explained more in detail in our tutorial videos.
You can find below, the link to our WordPress Tutorial Part 2:
Organizing Posts in WordPress
We shall talk more about WordPress in our next tutorials and blogs.
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