Your website is built on the WordPress engine. WordPress is known for its blogs and much of the lingo of this control panel will refer to blogs and things bloggish. In general you can think of blog as being synonymous with website or web store and post with content.
Sometimes, though, a blog is a blog and a post is a post. The Posts section of the Dashboard controls those functions that relate to the entries you make in your blog (web log). If you are operating a stand-alone blog this may be all the content of your site. On a website or web store this will mainly be content for the blog page.
It may be a little confusing at first but it should all fall into place quite quickly. Refer to these pages as often es necessary and, if things still aren’t clear, don’t ever hesitate to ask for clarification, or further information, if you need it.
In your own Dashboard click on the down-arrow to the right of Posts to reveal: Edit, Add New, Post Tags, Categories, and Plugins, as shown in the image to the left.
Each of these clickable menu items open a section to the right that controls a function, or functions, for working with the associated aspects of blog posts. We will discuss the first four of these entries below. Plugins will be discussed on a separate page. See About -> Using Your Website -> Managing Plugins for details.
The Edit and Add New functions are the backbone of your blog entry process. take the time to learn and understand these thoroughly as you will likely use them most often.
For the most part blog posts will be displayed, as you might expect, on the Blog page of your site. In some situations blog content can be shown elsewhere, such as in a box (WP name “widget”) on one of the columns on the side of the page (WP name: sidebar), or selected posts can be isolated and displayed, not in the blog itself, but rather as the contet on another page.
Edit will open up the function to edit any existing blogs. Initially it just accesses the test or default entry called “Hello World” but it will display each of your blog posts after you make them.
You can experiment with this:
1 – Pass your mouse pointer over the blog title and a menu is displayed: Edit | Quick Edit | Delete | View
– Edit allows you to make any required changes in the post. Clicking it will show you the various functions. Have a look at this. Many will be confusing at first but you only need to know about a few of them to start.
The details of your page may vary depending on which plugins (WordPress word for extra function modules added to the basic WordPress engine) have been activated for your site. You can read more about plugins on the Using Plugins help page.
You can see the title in a box. You can edit this by replacing the displayed title with something else. Try it. Just replace the existing text with something you type in its place.
The post content, starting with the word “Welcome…” is in the large editor box. Notice the Visual and HTML tabs to the right. Selecting “Visual” lets you utilize the various text fucntions shown just above the editor box and see the the content as it will show on the page. We call this WYSIWYG (pronounced wizzy-wig and it is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. If you need individual explanations for the editor functions please contact the MSMOsites owners for further details.
Selecting the HTML tab shows, and allows you to enter, the HTML code that controls the post content. Use this carefully. If you don’t know, or are not sure about, HTML you should probably stick with the Visual view. You can switch between the tabs at any time as you work with the post content.
Go ahead and make a few changes in the existing post text. Perhaps add an additional sentence or two. Experiment with the editor features.
Adding a picture is also easy. First, postion your mouse cursor within the content box and click where you want your picture to appear, perhaps on the line following the text, or between two paragraphs. There is a multi-point star or asterisk to the right of “Add media” at the left just above the content edit box. Click this star. A box will open. Notice the menu tabs at the top:
From Computer – From URL – Gallery – Media Library
These allow you to choose the source of your image/media. From Computer is for uploading images on your computer to your website. From URL is for using images hosted elsewhere on free or paid image hosting services or on a website. Gallery and Media Library are for internal (already uploaded) picture collections.
In this tutorial we’ll use the default From Computer to upload an image. Click the Select Files button. A browse box will open to your computer. Find and select an image file — anything is ok — you can delete it later. If it is acceptable it will be uploaded automatically and you should see “crunching…” for a second or so.
Once uploaded the menu within this box should extend showing a thumbnail of the image and several options. If you don’t see these there will be an open link to the right to click to extend the menu. You may need to use the scroll bar on the right to see the entire menu.
The extended menu items allow you to add some items including title (diplays in a tool tip pop-up box when you mouse over the image), caption (shown under the image and is also the alternate text, or alt, attribute in the HTML image tag for the file), description (diplayed text) and link URL (destination when the image is clicked). You may or may not want to use any of these. They are all optional.
There is also selection for Alignment (position) and Size. Select one of each and then click the Insert Into Post button and you will be returned to the post editor with either the image or the HTML code shoing in place depending on which editor tab you are currently using.
There are two other things you need to know in the Edit posts function:
Categories — below right you can select which category, or categories, the post will be assigned, and add more categories (link just below that) as needed. Categories also have their own section in the Posts menu to the left. We’ll look at that in turn. Categories let you group posts and allow your readers to view them by category if you include the blog categories widget in the sidebar. More about this in the Widgets section
Update Post — click the blue button when you are done. This saves your work and adds the post to the blog. There will be a link for you to “view post” or you can “Visit Site” (top of page) to see what your changes look like.
There are numerous other features and functions on this page so you may want to explore a little. The function of most is obvious. If you are not sure about their use please ask. We are glad to provide individual help to MSMOsites and Main Street Mall Online blog, website, or web store owners.
Returning to the Posts menu we find:
Add New which works in much the same way as the Edit function but starts out with a blank slate. Use this in the same way but to add new posts to upir blog.
Post Tags is a way to set up what are basically keywords that apply to your post(s). There is a section in the Edit and Add New sections where you can reference and select tags to assign to the post. These help with search engines and some people search for blog posts based on their specified tags. Like many other keyword functions these can be missused. The best results are obtained by always choosing, and using, tags that really are relevant to your post. You may or may not choose to use these at all.
Categories allows you to manage your categories outside of a specific post entering/editing session. You can pre-set the various categories you want available for your posts and they will be displayed in a list when you add or edit a post. You can still add a new category from within a post as well should you need to do so.
Click Here for a short (about 5 minutes) video that might help put this all in context. You’ll need a Macromedia Shock Wave Flash player plugin for your browser (most people already have this) to see this video.
