Posting with QuickPress

Notes for “Posting with QuickPress”

2010-03-02

Some folks mentioned the video and transcript for this tutorial make it sound like WordPress itself is rather limited. I do indeed need to clear that up in the video, but here are some notes to try clarifying.

WordPress provides plenty of powerful tools

Adding Posts the normal way in WordPress provides a lot of options and control. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any significant limitations to the WordPress posting process.

Sometimes plenty is too much

However, the normal “Add New Post” screen contains a lot of tools that you may not always need. These tools add to the time it takes for the page to load, and they may get in your way. While you can customize the layout of the screen using my techniques in “Room to move with WordPress,” your needs might be even simpler still.

QuickPress provides a bare-bones option

QuickPress is a trimmed-down, no-frills method of quickly adding a post to your site from the Dashboard.

Transcript for “Posting with QuickPress”

WordPress in a hurry

Hi, this is Paul Kaiser for WordPressCity.com. I’m in a bit of a hurry today, so I’m going to do a short tutorial showing you how to make a quick, no-frills Post using the ‘QuickPress’ toolbox on your dashboard.

The QuickPress toolbox

The QuickPress toolbox allows you to give your Post a ‘Title,’ some ‘Content,’ and assign ‘Tags’ to it. That’s it.

No Category choice

QuickPress does not allow you to assign ‘Categories’ to your post. Instead, it chooses a default Category as you’ve set under ‘Settings > Writing.’ We’ll discuss how to change these defaults later.

Making a Post

Let’s make a quick Post. Add a Title here. I’m going to paste in some Content. Add some Tags.

Post status options

Now, on a normal Post, I have the ability to ‘Save Draft,’ I can change its ‘Status,’ I can change its ‘Visibility,’ and I can also schedule when I want this Post to appear. You’ll notice in QuickPress I don’t have any of those options. I can save it as a draft, or I can ‘Publish’ it right away. If I save it as a draft, now I have the option to ‘Preview’ it, or I have the option to ‘Edit’ the Post, in the standard Post editor.

Other missing tools

Take another look at the QuickPress editing area, and then compare that to the standard Post editing screen. The standard screen offers the option of the ‘Visual’ editor, which is really nice, including these toolbar buttons such as you’d find in a lot of word processing applications. That’s not available in QuickPress. Also, other toolboxes like ‘Excerpt’ are not available to QuickPress. Some Plugins and Themes add their own toolbars to the main editing screen. Those will not be available to you in QuickPress.

‘Quick’ is the key term

QuickPress is intended for making quick-and-dirty Posts to the default Category. That’s it. I hope this helped you understand QuickPress, and find out where it will fit in your blogging… plans.