5. Posts

When you think blog, you usually think posts. These are frequently changing bits of content that build up your blog.

In WordPress each post is a dated entry that can be tagged, put in a category, and displayed in a variety of default ways. Each will have an individual page,  but also automatically appears in chronological streams of all Posts. For example, an individual Post “What is WordPress“, also appears first in the “Mini-lessons” page, which is a stream of all Posts with Category “lesson” in ascending date order.

So lets create some Posts and try out some of the features of the Editor!

First Post

To create a new Post, click on “Add” next to Blog Posts in the Dashboard menu,

or click the Edit icon in the upper right Admin bar.

This will bring you to a fresh Post Editor window, like this:

Use the Editor on the right to start adding content. Create a Title, then click in the box below to start writing. Create an excited snippet just for fun this time, its your blog’s first big post, but you can Delete it any time! Editor saves your work every few seconds, so if you leave this page, it should be saved as a Draft Post.

Just for practice, click “Publish” to save this post and make it live on your site.

Add Images

Now, repeat. Lets create another new Post to try other features of the Editor.

On this post write a intro sentence, if you really can’t think of something, try “This is my second post”. Now lets add an image. Click the media icon on the left side of the Editor options ribbon. This will open up the Media Library management window:

This might seem odd at first. However, since all content is managed by the CMS in a database, you don’t just paste the image into a Post; you upload it to the system and create a link. This ensures the media can be seamlessly reused in other places and managed by the system. But don’t worry about that!

To upload a new image, click the “Add New” button and navigate to the source. Your theme will also probably include some default images you can use. All images and other media you have available will appear in the library. Choose one and click the “Insert” button. The image will now appear at the place where your cursor was in the Post.

There are many options to format the images. However, in general, if you want the image to fill the whole space of the post, press return twice after some text, and put the image on a new line by itself. If you want the image to appear smaller inline, put it on the same line as some text. Sometimes the Visual editor will have odd hiccups with images. Switch to the HTML view and add space between the text and image code to fix it.

Add Links

Now that you have an image in this post, lets add some links to the text.

Add something like “remember to check out my About page” to the Post in the Editor. Use your mouse to highlight “About”. Then click the link icon in the Editor options ribbon 

This will bring up the link manager:

If you want to link to an outside source, simply  copy the web address from your browser and paste the link into the URL box. Leave the Link Text alone, since this is the bit of text you highlights in the Post. If you want the link to open a new tab, rather than replacing the current one, check the option box. Sometimes this is helpful for outside resources, so that users do not loose their place on your blog.

If you want to link to other Pages or Posts on you own site, then use the “Link to existing content” option NOT the URL box. Look through the box to find the item you want to link to and select it. This is very handy because you can change the names of the item, but WordPress will automatically keep the links up-to-date.

Then click “Add Link” to create the hyperlink in your text.

Now click “Publish” to push this new post live to your site. Make sure you got the green success message again!

This time, don’t navigate back or create a new post. Lets keep editing the same one.

Categories & Tags

The menu on the left side offers further options for the Post. The most important is the “Categories & Tags” menu. Adding Categories and Tags helps other people find your content, enabling browsing features and making connections across all WordPress properties. It can also help you organize your posts to create topical arrangements and views for the site. For example, if a user clicks on one of your tags, she will see a page with a stream of all the Posts with that tag. The Mini-lessons page on this site was created using Categories way. It is simply a link to the category “lessons”, which displays a stream of all posts assigned that category.

On your post Editor, click on “Categories & Tags” to expand the menu. Create a new category and add a few Tags.

Now click “Update”. The “Publish” button has changed to “Update” since the post is already published. Once you see the green success message, the updated post with tags should be live on your site.

Schedule

You don’t necessarily want all posts to be published instantly. WordPress allows you to schedule your posts so that they will publish automatically when the time comes.

Create a new post and write some dummy content.

Click on the calendar icon next to the “Publish” button.

This will bring up a calendar where you can set the exact day and time you want the post to go live. Once you set a time in the future, click “Schedule” to save.

Nice work! You know all the basics to create your site. The next lesson takes another look at Configuration options.