Writing a simple Post

09. Mar, 2010 0 Comments

Note about “Writing a simple Post”

In the video, I mentioned the “Allow Comments” option would not even appear if you had turned off Comments site-wide in “Settings > Discussion.” That is not correct. The option will still appear, but simply be unchecked / off by default.

Transcript of the “Writing a simple Post” tutorial

Hi, this is Paul Kaiser for WordPressCity.com. Today I want to show you, real quickly, how to add a simple Post to your WordPress website. When you first log in and come to your Dashboard, here’s what you see. Under “Posts” if you go to “Add New” you are going to get to the screen we are discussing today. This is a small screen, so I’m going to click here to give myself a little more room, since I don’t really need these tools out here.

Name your Post

Now, what’s the title of my new Post? I’m going to call it “My Tuesday Test Post.”

What does your Post say?

Then right here is where I put the actual text of my Post. I am not feeling creative today, so I’m going to use my “Dummy Lipsum” tool and generate some dummy text, copy it, now I can just paste it in there. I can paste in there from other applications, too, which we’ll discuss in another post. There, I’ve got some body copy now.

What can see this Post, and when?

Over here I can control how this is published — who can see it, when it is going to be published. The “Status” we will get into later when you are editing a Post, but “Visibility” — most of the time you want everyone to be able to see it, but if you don’t, you could say “Password protected,” and I can give it a password, whatever. But then, anyone who wants to see it is going to have to know that password, so you could give the password out to your friends or the people who, you know, you want to be able to see it. “Private” would allow just me to see it. I think other Administrators of the site could also see it. But again, by default, “Public” is the way to go. We’ll discuss these other options in another post. But what about when? Maybe I want to schedule it. I want to put a bunch of Posts up here, but I want them to be scheduled for different times. Well, all I have to do is “Edit” and I can say, you know what, let’s not show this until March 10th, this year, at — let’s see, 16 would be 4 o’clock, so, 4:30. Then I’ll hit “OK.” Well now you’ll notice the “Publish” button changed to “Schedule,” because if I hit “Publish,” well that kind of implies I’m posting it right now. This changes to “Schedule,” so it says “Hey, you click this button and you’re good-to-go, and at, you know, March 10th at 4:30 it will be showing up.”

Tagging your Post with keywords

“Post Tags.” Now, “Tags” we’ll discuss in detail in a later post, but Tags are like a really liberal kind of Category. So, maybe I have 5 topic areas this Post touches on, so, I can put all of those Tags in here, and then use those common Tags in other Posts throughout my site. So, maybe this is police-related, maybe it’s fire-related, maybe it is also health-related, and finally, pet-related. I know that’s going to be crazy, but hit “Add,” and now all those tags are here, and it’s just a way to organize this Post and several others under some common keywords — if you will. I’m going to zip that up to get it out of the way.

Organizing your Post into Categories

So here are my real Categories. Now, Categories themselves, you don’t want to be so liberal. Generally, a site that has 100 Categories, well that’s going to be hard for people to really sort through and find out what they want. So, on our test site here, I think I’m going to call this “Bad News.” I could add multiple ones if I wanted to. Maybe it was “Bad News” about a “Music Performance” that happened in town, that went bad, I don’t know, but let’s just leave it as “Bad News” and we’re good-to-go. We are going to discuss more about what you can do with Categories later. For instance, you would be able to add a new Category right on this screen, but we’ll touch on that in a different tutorial. I’m going to zip that up to get it out of the way.

Who wrote your Post?

“Post Author,” if I have enough permissions, I can change it to another Author on the site, I can say well actually bobby gave this to me and I’m posting it for him, or whatever. I’m going to leave it here, because I am the actual one posting it. You can alter that, I think, if you’re an Editor or Adminstrator. I’m going to zip that up.

Allowing comments and link notification

“Discussion” — I don’t know why I just skipped over that. Discussion, depending on the settings of your site you might allow people to comment and you might allow people who reference your website — they might reference this post — if they do so, you’re site can get a pingback from them, and then it will let you know on the Dashboard, hey, so-and-so referred to this article on their own website. Well you can turn these off — I don’t know why you would want to turn that off. You can turn Comments off. Maybe you allow Comments on your site, but you don’t want Comments on this one particular article. Well, I can turn it off right there. If I have disabled Comments site-wide, well then I don’te think I’ll even have this option here.

Quick summary of your Post

“Excerpt.” Excerpt is like an abstract, it’s like, I may have this 3-page article here, but on some of the pages of my site, maybe I want the template just to show the Title and just a small introduction. Well, if I don’t put an Excerpt here, but my Theme is going to show just an introduction, it will use like the first 50 words or maybe it will go by characters, and just build its own Excerpt. Well, that might not make a whole lot of sense, using that automatic method. So, I can go here and I can write my own Excerpt that makes more sense in that condensed format. “This is about a music event that went awry last Saturday.” Okay, and that’s what would be used then in my template, if it were making use of this Excerpt. I’m going to zip that up to get it out of the way.

Trackbacks – for later

“Trackbacks,” we’re not going to discuss here. Generally, you’re not even going to need them, but the capability is here. It’s been there for a long time and I don’t know that it’s going to go away. I’m going to zip it up and we’ll talk about that in another tutorial.

Powerful custom fields – for later

“Custom Fields,” allows us to do many powerful things with WordPress, so, again, it’s going to be in another tutorial, because I don’t want to make this one go on too long. Finally, I’m done with the Post.

Let ‘er rip

I’ve done everything I needed to do, and now I can hit “Schedule” so that I can make it happen.