WordPress Beginner: Creating/Managing Content

Transcript of the free preview lesson. Remaining lessons unlock with the full course.

Hello, my name is Chrissy, and in these lessons you will learn how to manage, and create posts and pages. Posts and pages are two types of content that are installed with WordPress by default. Posts are typically used for timely content like blog posts, or news articles, or other types of information that needs to be displayed in chronological order. Pages are typically used for more static content, like you're about page, your services page, or your contact page. We're gonna look at how to manage them first. So to do that you need to be logged into the WordPress dashboard, and then you can go to the post menu, or the pages menu. Let's start with posts. So if I click on posts, that's gonna take me to the post screen, and on there I can see all of the posts that I currently have on my website. And you can see right now I've got two and they are both published. So you can see this link up here that says published. Both of those are published. Notice when I move my mouse over each of these posts that I get a sub-menu underneath of it. And in that sub-menu I can edit the post, I can click edit, I can put it in the trash or I can view it. So I'm gonna start on the right and I'm gonna click on view, and we can see that that shows me post on the website, it shows me the post within the theme. If I go back and then click on trash, that's going to put the post in the trash. If I did that accidentally, I can quickly undo it or I can go into the trash right here and I can restore it. You also have the option to delete it permanently, or if you have several items in the trash and you want to delete all of them, you can just click on empty trash. I'm gonna go back and restore it cause I wanna show you what happens when you do that. And you can see I no longer have anything in the trash, but if I click on all, you can see that now that post is a draft, and you can see here that now I have one published and one draft. If I wanted to make this not a draft, or if I wanted to publish it, I can do that very easily with the Quick Editor. So I would just click on quick edit and then over here on the right side, I can change the status to published, and then update this post so it is now published again. If you need to edit the post, you would just click on this edit link and that's gonna take you into the post editor where you can make changes to it. So just a few more things about this post screen, you can select multiple posts at one time. So if I click on this button right here that's gonna select all of the posts or you can individually click on posts to select them, and then you can use the bulk actions menu to edit them, or move them to the trash. The editor is sort of a simplified version of the Quick Editor. You can see that you can apply categories to it, you can change a few other options, namely, you can change the status. So if you've got several posts that are draft and you wanna publish them all at once, you can choose all of them and then publish them all at once. I don't need to make changes so I'm just gonna click cancel. Another thing I wanna point out here is you've got several columns, and right now I've got two posts displayed. If I wanted to change the number of posts that gets displayed or which columns appear, I can click up here on the screen options tab. And you can see here I can change some of the columns, some of them like the date or the title, I can't change, those are necessary to display them. And you can see I can also change the number of items that gets displayed per page. Right now I only have two posts but once you get to a hundred posts, you might wanna see more than 20 at a time, so you can change that number. I don't recommend changing it to a really large number because that can really slow the site down. So I'm gonna just click on apply if I made any changes to that. So one other thing about the posts is that they can have categories and tags apply to them. Categories or sort of like a table of contents for your posts, and tags are like the index. So you can see here that I currently have four categories and three of them have check boxes, but one of them does not. And that's because this uncategorized category is the default category. And you can set that by going to the settings and then writing. And you can see here that the default post category is uncategorized. If you wanted to change it to chocolate recipes, you could. So I can change that and then save my changes here. If I go back to my post categories, now you can see that uncategorized has a check mark next to it and I can now delete it. So it's gonna delete it, it doesn't delete the posts that are related to it if there are any, it just deletes the category. You can add new categories by typing in their name so if I wanted to add one for entrees, I could do that. The slug, you can enter that if you want to otherwise it automatically takes the name, turns it into the slug. I can give a category a parent, so right now I'm adding an entree category, and I'm gonna set the parent to chocolate recipes. The description is optional, some of the ways that WordPress gets displayed are going to show it, some don't. The one that I'm currently using does not so I'm not gonna add anything. And then I can just click on add new category and you can see that that adds the entree category as a subcategory of chocolate recipes. Next, we'll look at tags, and you can see tags are similar to categories. Both of them are referred to as taxonomies and the difference between categories and tags is that categories are hierarchical, so they can have parents and children, tags are not, they can't have parents or children, they're just all one level. And you can see I already have several tags here and they can just like you can with the categories, I can edit them, I can delete them, and you can add new ones. Now let's take a look at pages. So if you click on the pages menu to do that, you can see that I've got several pages and two of them are drafts, and two of them are published as we can see here. And this looks a lot like the post page, you can see that you've got the bulk actions, you've got the same bulk actions. If I threw something in the trash, so if I click on trash for this, and I can go into the trash and I can delete it, I can restore it, so I'll restore it. I go back to the all, you can see here that I can quick edit this just like I could with the posts. You just don't have as many settings for the pages as you do for posts. So one thing to note is that you don't have categories or tags for your pages. So again, pages are a little bit different from posts. You do also have the screen options like we saw on the post screen. So that's pretty much it for managing the posts and pages. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you how to create a post.