WordPress is a powerful publishing tool, especially when you use the full range of options available. With the basic settings configured (which I show you how to do in Chapter 4), now is the time to go forth and publish! You can skip to the “Writing Your First Entry” section in this chapter and jump right into creating new posts for your website. Or you can stay right here and discover some of the options you can set to make your website a bit more organized and logical from the get-go.
Content on your website can become unwieldy and disorganized, requiring you to revisit these next few features sometime in the near future so that you can get the beast under control. Why not do a little planning and get the work over with now? I promise that it won’t take that long, and you’ll thank me for it later.
Staying on Topic with Categories
In WordPress, a category is what you determine to be the main topic of an individual piece of content on your site. Through the use of categories, you can file your posts into topics by subject. To improve your readers’ experiences in navigating your site, WordPress organizes posts by the categories you assign to them. Visitors can click the categories they’re interested in to see the posts you’ve written on those particular topics.
You should know ahead of time that the list of categories you set up is displayed on your site in a few places, including the following:
Body of the post: In most WordPress themes, you see the title followed by a statement such as Filed In:Category 1,Category 2. The reader can click the category name to go to a page that lists all the posts you’ve made in that particular category. You can assign a single post to more than one category.
Navigation menu: Almost all sites have a navigation menu that visitors can use to navigate your site. You can place links to categories on the navigation menu, particularly if you want to draw attention to particular categories.
Sidebar of your theme: You can place a full list of category titles in the sidebar. A reader can click any category and arrive at a page on your site that lists the posts you’ve made within that particular category.
Subcategories (also known as category children) can further refine the main category topic by listing specific topics related to the main (parent) category. In your WordPress Dashboard, on the Manage Categories page, subcategories are listed directly below the main category. Here’s an example:
Books I Enjoy (main category)
Fiction (subcategory)
Nonfiction (subcategory)
Trashy Romance (subcategory)
Biographies (subcategory)
For Dummies (subcategory)
Changing the name of a category
Upon installation, WordPress gives you one default category to get you started: Uncategorized. (See the Categories screen shown in Figure 5-1.) That category name is pretty generic, so you’ll definitely want to change it to one that’s more specific to you. (On my site, I changed it to Life in General. Although that name’s still a bit on the generic side, it doesn’t sound quite so…well, uncategorized.)
FIGURE 5-1: The Categories screen of a brand-new site shows the default Uncategorized category.
The default category also serves as a kind of fail-safe. If you publish a post to your site and don’t assign that post to a category, the post is automatically assigned to the default category, no matter what you name the category.
So how do you change the name of that default category? When you’re logged in to your WordPress Dashboard, just follow these steps:
Click the Categories link on the Posts submenu of the Dashboard navigation menu.
The Categories screen opens, containing all the tools you need to set up and edit category titles for your site.
Click the title of the category you want to edit.
If you want to change the Uncategorized category, click the word Uncategorized to open the Edit Category screen (see Figure 5-2).
Type the new name for the category in the Name text box.
Type the new slug in the Slug text box.
The term slug refers to the word(s) used in the web address for the specific category. The category Books, for example, has a web address of http://yourdomain.com/category/books. If you change the slug to Books I Like, the web address is http://yourdomain.com/category/books-i-like. (WordPress automatically inserts hyphens between the slug words in the web address.)
Choose a parent category from the Parent drop-down menu.
If you want this category to be a main category, not a subcategory, choose None.
(Optional) Type a description of the category in the Description text box.
Use this description to remind yourself what your category is about. Some WordPress themes display the category description right on your site, too, which can be helpful for your visitors. (See Chapter 9 for more about themes.) You’ll know that your theme is coded in this way if your site displays the category description on the category page(s).
Click the Update button.
The information you just edited is saved, and the Categories screen reloads, showing your new category name.
FIGURE 5-2: Editing a category in the Edit Category screen.
If you want to edit a category’s name only, you can click the Quick Edit link below the name on the Category screen, which you see when you hover your mouse over the Category name. Then you can do a quick name edit without having to load the Edit Category screen.
Creating new categories and deleting others
Today, tomorrow, next month, next year — as your website grows in size and age, you’ll continue adding new categories to further define and archive the history of your posts. You aren’t limited in the number of categories and subcategories you can create.
Creating a new category is as easy as following these steps:
Click the Categories link on the Posts submenu of the Dashboard navigation menu.
The Categories screen opens, displaying the Add New Category section on the left side (see Figure 5-3).
Type the name of your new category in the Name text box.
If you want to create a category in which you file all your posts about the books you read, for example, you might type Books I Enjoy.
Type a name in the Slug text box.
The slug creates the link to the category page that lists all the posts you’ve made in this category. If you leave this field blank, WordPress automatically creates a slug based on the category name. If the category is Books I Enjoy, WordPress automatically creates a category slug like this: http://yourdomain.com/category/books-i-enjoy. If you want to shorten it, you can. Type books in the category Slug text box, and the link to the category becomes http://yourdomain.com/category/books.
Choose the category’s parent from the Parent Category drop-down menu.
Choose None if you want this new category to be a parent (or top-level) category. If you’d like this category to be a subcategory of another category, choose the category you want to be the parent of this one.
(Optional) Type a description of the category in the Description text box.
Some WordPress templates are set up to display the category description directly below the category name (see Chapter 9). Providing a description helps you further define the category intent for your readers. The description can be as short or as long as you like.
Click the Add New Category button.
That’s it! You’ve added a new category to your blog. Armed with this information, you can add an unlimited number of categories to your new site.
FIGURE 5-3: Create a new category for your website.
You can delete a category by hovering your mouse over the title of the category you want to delete and then clicking the Delete link that appears below the title.
Deleting a category doesn’t delete the posts and links in that category. Instead, posts in the deleted category are assigned to the Uncategorized category (or whatever you named the default category).
If you have an established WordPress site with categories already created, you can convert some or all of your categories to tags. To do so, look for the Category to Tag Converter link in the bottom-right corner of the Categories screen of your WordPress Dashboard (refer to Figure 5-1). Click it to convert your categories to tags. (See the nearby sidebar “What are tags, and how/why do I use them?” for more information.)
Examining a Post’s Address: Permalinks
Each WordPress post and page is assigned its own web page, and the address (or URL) of that page is called a permalink. Posts that you see in WordPress sites usually put their permalinks in any of four areas:
The title of the blog post
The Comments link below the post
A separate permalink that appears (in most themes) below the post
The titles of posts appearing in a Recent Posts sidebar
Permalinks are meant to be permanent links to your blog posts (which is where the perma part of that word comes from, in case you’re wondering). Ideally, the permalink of a post never changes. WordPress creates the permalink automatically when you publish a new post.
By default, a permalink in WordPress looks like this:
http://yourdomain.com/?p=100/
The p stands for post, and 100 is the ID assigned to the individual post. You can leave the permalinks in this format if you don’t mind letting WordPress associate each post with an ID number.
WordPress, however, lets you take your permalinks to the beauty salon for a bit of a makeover. I’ll bet you didn’t know that permalinks could be pretty, did you? They certainly can. Allow me to explain.
Making your post links pretty
Pretty permalinks are links that are more pleasing to the eye than standard links and, ultimately, more pleasing to search-engine spiders. (See Chapter 12 for an explanation of why search engines like pretty permalinks.) Pretty permalinks look something like this:
On this screen, you find several options for creating permalinks:
Plain (ugly permalinks): WordPress assigns an ID number to each post and creates the URL in this format: http://yourdomain.com/?p=123.
Day and Name (pretty permalinks): For each post, WordPress generates a permalink URL that includes the year, month, day, and post slug/title: http://yourdomain.com/2017/03/20/sample-post/.
Month and Name (also pretty permalinks): For each post, WordPress generates a permalink URL that includes the year, month, and post slug/title: http://yourdomain.com/2017/03/sample-post/.
Numeric (not so pretty): WordPress assigns a numerical value to the permalink. The URL is created in this format: http://yourdomain.com/archives/123.
Post Name (my preferred option): WordPress takes the title of your post or page and generates the permalink URL from those words. The name of the page that contains my bibliography, for example, is called simply Books; therefore, for this permalink structure, WordPress creates the permalink URL http://lisasabin-wilson.com/books. Likewise, a post titled WordPress Is Awesome gets a permalink URL like this: http://lisasabin-wilson.com/wordpress-is-awesome.
Custom Structure: WordPress creates permalinks in the format you choose. You can create a custom permalink structure by using tags or variables, as I discuss in the next section.
To create a pretty-permalink structure, select the Post Name radio button; then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.
Customizing your permalinks
A custom permalink structure is one that lets you define which variables you want to see in your permalinks by using the tags listed in Table 5-1.
Text — usually, the post name — separated by hyphens (such as making-pretty-permalinks)
%post_id%
The unique numerical ID of the post (such as 123)
%category%
The text of the category name that you filed the post in (such as books-i-read)
%author%
The text of the post author’s name (such as lisa-sabin-wilson)
One nifty feature of WordPress is that it remembers when you change your permalink structure and automatically writes an internal redirect from the old permalink structure to the new one.
If you want your permalink to show the year, month, day, category, and post name, select the Custom Structure radio button in the Permalink Settings page, and type the following tags in the Custom Structure text box:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%category%/%postname%/
If you use this permalink format, a link for a post made on March 20, 2017, called WordPress For Dummies and filed in the Books I Read category, would look like this:
Be sure to include slashes (/) before tags, between tags, and at the very end of the string of tags. This format ensures that WordPress creates correct, working permalinks by using the correct rewrite rules located in the .htaccess file for your site. (See “Making sure that your permalinks work with your server” later in this chapter for information on rewrite rules and .htaccess files.)
Changing the structure of your permalinks in the future affects the permalinks for all the posts on your blog — new and old. Keep this fact in mind if you decide to change the permalink structure. An especially important reason: Search engines (such as Google and Yahoo!) index the posts on your site by their permalinks, so changing the permalink structure makes all those indexed links obsolete.
Don’t forget to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the Permalink Settings page; otherwise, your permalink changes won’t be saved!
Making sure that your permalinks work with your server
After you set the format for the permalinks for your site by using any options other than the default, WordPress writes specific rules, or directives, to the .htaccess file on your web server. The .htaccess file in turn communicates to your web server how it should serve up the permalinks, according to the permalink structure you’ve chosen to use. To use an .htaccess file, you need to know the answers to two questions:
Does your web server configuration use and give you access to the .htaccess file?
Does your web server run Apache with the mod_rewrite module?
If you don’t know the answers, contact your hosting provider to find out.
You and WordPress work together in glorious harmony to create the .htaccess file that lets you use a pretty-permalink structure on your website. The file works like this:
Locate the .htaccess file on your web server, or create one and put it there.
If .htaccess already exists, you can find it in the root of your directory on your web server — that is, the same directory where you find your wp-config.php file. If you don’t see the file in the root directory, try changing the options of your SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) client to show hidden files. Because the .htaccess file starts with a period (.), it may not be visible until you configure your SFTP client to show hidden files.
If you need to create the file and put it on your web server, follow these steps:
Using a plain-text editor (such as Notepad for Windows or TextEdit for Mac), create a blank file, and name it htaccess.txt.
Upload htaccess.txt to your web server via SFTP. (See Chapter3for more information about SFTP.)
Rename the file .htaccess (notice the period at the beginning), and make sure that it’s writable by the server by changing permissions to 755 or 777. (See Chapter3for information on changing permissions on server files.)
Create the permalink structure on the Permalink Settings screen of your WordPress Dashboard.
Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the Permalink Settings screen.
WordPress inserts into the .htaccess file the specific rules necessary for making the permalink structure functional in your blog.
If you followed these steps correctly, you have an .htaccess file on your web server that has the correct permissions set so that WordPress can write the correct rules to it. Your pretty-permalink structure works flawlessly. Kudos!
If you open the .htaccess file and look at it now, you see that it’s no longer blank. It should contain code called rewrite rules, which looks something like this:
# BEGIN WordPress <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </IfModule> # END WordPress
I could delve deeply into .htaccess and all the things you can do with this file, but I’m restricting this section to how it applies to WordPress permalink structures. If you’d like to unlock more mysteries of .htaccess, check out “Comprehensive Guide to .htaccess” at www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml.
Discovering the Many WordPress RSS Options
In Chapter 2, you can read about RSS feed technology and why it’s an important part of publishing content on the Internet. Allow me to quote myself from that chapter: For your readers to stay updated with the latest and greatest content you post to your site, they need to subscribe to your RSS feed.
RSS feeds come in different flavors, including RSS 0.92, RDF/RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom. The differences lie within the base code that makes up the functionality of the syndication feed. What’s important is that WordPress supports all versions of RSS — which means that anyone can subscribe to your RSS feed with any type of feed reader available.
I mention many times throughout this book that WordPress is very intuitive, and this section on RSS feeds is a shining example of a feature that WordPress automates. WordPress has a built-in feed generator that works behind the scenes to create feeds for you. This feed generator creates feeds from your posts, comments, and even categories.
The RSS feed for your posts is autodiscoverable, which means that almost all RSS feed readers and most browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari, for example) automatically detect the RSS feed URL for a WordPress blog. Table 5-2 gives you some good guidelines on how to find the RSS feed URLs for the different sections of your site.
http://yourdomain.com/wp-rss.php or http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rss
RDF/RSS 1.0
http://yourdomain.com/wp-rdf.php or http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rdf
RSS 2.0
http://yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rss2
Atom
http://yourdomain.com/wp-atom.php or http://yourdomain.com/?feed=atom
Comments RSS
http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rss&p=50 p stands for post, and 50 is the post ID. You can find the post ID in the Dashboard by clicking the Posts link. Locate a post and hover the mouse over the title to find the ID in the URL that displays in your browser status bar.
Category RSS
http://yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=50 cat stands for category, and 50 is the category ID. You can find the category ID in the Dashboard by clicking the Categories link. Locate a category and hover the mouse over the title to find the ID in the URL that displays in your browser’s status bar.
If you’re using custom permalinks (see “Making your post links pretty” earlier in this chapter), you can simply add /feed to the end of any URL on your blog to find the RSS feed. Some of your links will look similar to these:
http://yourdomain.com/feed — your main RSS feed
http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed — your comments RSS feed
http://yourdomain.com/category/cat-name/feed — RSS feed for a category
Try this technique with any URL on your site. Add /feed at the end, and you’ll have the RSS feed for that page.
RSS feeds are important parts of delivering content from your blog to your readers. RSS feeds are expected these days, so the fact that WordPress takes care of everything for you — provides the feeds for you, complies with all RSS formats, and offers many internal feeds — gives the software a huge advantage over any other content management system.
Writing Your First Entry
It’s finally time to write your first post on your new WordPress site! The topic you choose to write about and the writing techniques you use to get your message across are all on you; I have my hands full writing this book! I can tell you, however, how to write the wonderful passages that can bring you blog fame. Ready?
Composing your blog post
Composing a post is a lot like typing an email: You give it a title, you write the message, and you click a button to send your words into the world.
You can collapse or reposition all the modules on the Add New Post screen to suit your needs. The only section of the Add New Post screen that you can’t collapse and reposition is the section with the actual title and post box (where you write your post).
Follow these steps to write a basic post:
Click the Add New link on the Posts menu of the Dashboard.
The Add New Post screen opens, as shown in Figure 5-5.
Type the title of your post in the Enter Title Here text field at the top of the Add New Post screen.
Type the content of your post in the text box.
You can use the Visual Text Editor to format the text in your post. I explain the Visual Text Editor and the buttons and options after these steps.
Click the Save Draft button in the Publish module, located in the top-right corner of the Add New Post screen.
The screen refreshes with your post title and content saved but not yet published to your site.
FIGURE 5-5: This page is where you give your post a title and write your post body.
By default, the area in which you write your post is in Visual Editing mode, as indicated by the Visual tab that appears above the text. Visual Editing mode is how WordPress provides WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) options for formatting. Rather than embed HTML code in your post, you can simply type your post, highlight the text you want to format, and click the buttons (shown in Figure 5-5) that appear above the text box.
If you’ve ever used a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word, you’ll recognize many of these buttons, which are on the top row of the toolbar and are listed in order from left to right:
Paragraph drop-down menu: Allows you to select text formatting:
Paragraph: Inserts <p> </p> HTML tags around the text to indicate paragraph breaks.
Headings 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6: Inserts header HTML tags such as <H1> </H1> around text to indicate HTML headings. H1 defines the largest, and H6 defines the smallest. Heading formats are usually defined in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets; see Chapter 10) with font size and/or colors.
Preformatted: Inserts <pre> </pre> HTML tags around the text to indicate preformatted text, and preserves both spaces and line breaks.
Bold: Embeds the <strong> </strong> HTML tag to emphasize the text in bold (example: Bold Text).
Italic: Embeds the <em> </em> HTML tag to emphasize the text in italics (example: Italic Text).
Bulleted List: Embeds the <ul><li> </li></ul> HTML tags that create an unordered (bulleted) list.
Numbered List: Embeds the <ol><li> </li></ol> HTML tags that create an ordered (numbered) list.
Blockquote: Inserts the <blockquote> </blockquote> HTML tag that indents the paragraph or section of text you’ve selected.
Align Left: Inserts the <p align=" left"> </p> HTML tag that lines up the selected text against the left margin.
Align Center: Inserts the <p align=" center"> </p> HTML tag that positions the selected text in the center of the page.
Align Right: Inserts the <p align=" right"> </p> HTML tag that lines up the selected text against the right margin.
Insert/Edit Link: Inserts the <a href=" " > </a> HTML tag around the text you’ve selected to create a hyperlink.
Remove Link: Removes the hyperlink from the selected text, if it was previously linked.
Insert Read More Tag: Inserts the <!--more--> tag, which lets you split the display on your blog page, and publishes the text written above this tag with a Read More link, which takes the user to a page with the full post. This feature is good for really long posts.
Toolbar Toggle: Displays more formatting options for your posts. Click the Toolbar Toggle icon to see a new formatting list, which provides options for a veritable kitchen sink full of options, including underlining, font color, custom characters, undo, and redo:
Strikethrough: Embeds the <strike> </strike> HTML tag that puts a line through your text (example: Strikethrough Text).
Horizontal Line: Embeds the <hr> </hr> HTML tag that puts a horizontal line in your content.
Text Color: Displays the text in the color you’ve chosen.
Paste As Text: Comes in handy when you copy text from another source. This option removes all formatting and special/hidden characters from the text and adds it to your post as unformatted text.
Clear Formatting: Removes all formatting inside the post.
Decrease Indent: Moves text to the left one preset level with each click.
Increase Indent: Moves text to the right one preset level with each click.
Undo: Undoes your last formatting action.
Redo: Redoes the last formatting action that you undid.
Keyboard Shortcuts: Opens a window of helpful information about keyboard shortcuts.
Distraction Free Writing Mode: Lets you focus purely on writing, without the distraction of all the other options on the page. Click this button, and the Post text box expands to fill the full height and width of your browser screen, displaying only the barest essentials for writing your post. To bring the Post text box back to its normal state, click the Exit Full Screen link. Voilà — it’s back to normal!
You can turn off the Visual Text Editor by clicking the Your Profile link on the Users menu. Deselect the Use the Visual Editor When Writing check box to turn off this editor if you’d rather manually insert the HTML code into your posts.
If you’d rather embed your own HTML code and skip the Visual Text Editor, click the Text tab that appears to the right of the Visual tab. If you’re planning to type HTML code in your post — for a table or video files, for example — you have to click the Text tab before you insert that code. If you don’t, the Visual Text Editor formats your code, which most likely will look nothing like you intended it to.
At this point, you can skip to “Publishing your post” later in this chapter for information on publishing your post to your site, or continue with the following sections to discover how to refine the options for your post.
WordPress has a nifty, built-in autosave feature that saves your work while you’re typing and editing a new post. If your browser crashes, or if you accidentally close your browser window before you’ve saved your post, the post will be there for you when you get back. Those WordPress folks are so thoughtful!
Dressing up your posts with images, video, and audio
Directly above and to the left of the Visual Text Editor row of buttons is an Add Media area, with a row of four icons. These icons let you insert images/photos, photo galleries, videos, and audio files into your posts. WordPress has an entire Media Library capability, which I describe in detail in Chapter 6.
Refining your post options
After you write the post, you can choose a few extra options before you publish it for the entire world to see. By default, the Add New Post screen of the WordPress Dashboard displays only a few options, because they’re the minimum options you need to publish a post. You can find these options below the post text box (see Figure 5-6). Click the title of each option, and the settings for that specific option expand.
FIGURE 5-6: Several options are available for your blog post.
If you don’t see these options on the Add New Post page of your Dashboard, you most likely haven’t enabled them in Screen Options (discussed in Chapter 4). Click the Screen Options tab at the top of the Add New Post page, and enable the modules that you’d like to use.
You can reposition the modules on the Add New Post page to fit the way you use this page.
Here are the options below the post text box:
Excerpt: Excerpts are short summaries of your posts. Many authors use snippets to show teasers of their posts on their websites, thereby encouraging readers to click the Read More links to read the posts in their entirety. Type your summary in the Excerpt box. Excerpts can be any length in terms of words, but the point is to keep them short and sweet to tease your readers into clicking the Read More link.
Send Trackbacks: If you want to send a trackback to another site, enter the site’s trackback URL in the Send Trackbacks To text box. You can send trackbacks to more than one blog; just be sure to separate trackback URLs with spaces. For more on trackbacks, see Chapter 2.
Custom Fields: Custom fields add extra data to your posts, and you can fully configure them. You can read more about the Custom Fields feature of WordPress in Chapter 12.
Discussion: Decide whether to let readers submit comments through the comment system by selecting the Allow Comments on This Post check box. By default, the check box is selected; deselect it to disallow comments on this post.
Slug: A slug is part of the URL of your post, added to your domain. For a post titled WordPress Tips, for example, WordPress automatically creates a URL from that title that looks like this: http://domain.com/wordpress-tips. The Slug options allow you to set a different slug for your post (or page) from the one WordPress automatically creates for you. You could shorten the slug for the post titled WordPress Tips to wordpress so that the URL for the post becomes http://domain.com/wordpress.
Author: If you’re running a multiauthor blog, you can select the name of the author who wrote this post. By default, your own author name is selected in the Author drop-down menu.
These optional modules in the preceding list apply to the post you’re currently working on — not to any future or past posts. You can find these options below the Post text box after they’re activated in Screen Options. Click the title of each option to make the settings for that specific option expand or collapse.
Publish: These options are the publishing and privacy options for your post, which I cover in the upcoming “Publishing your post” section.
Format: This module appears only when the theme you’re using on your site supports a WordPress feature called Post Formats (which I cover in detail in Chapter 12). In the Format module, you can select the type of format you want to use for the post you’re publishing.
Categories: You can file your posts in categories to organize them by subject. (For more about organizing your posts by category, refer to “Staying on Topic with Categories” earlier in this chapter.) Select the box to the left of the category you want to use. You can toggle between listing all categories and seeing just the categories you use the most by clicking the All Categories or Most Used link, respectively. Don’t see the category you need listed here? Click the + Add New Category link, and you can add a category right there on the Add New Post page!
Tags: Type your desired tags in the text box. Be sure to separate tags with commas so that WordPress knows where each tag begins and ends. Cats, Kittens, Felines represent three different tags, for example, but without the commas, WordPress would consider those three words to be one tag. Click the Add button to add the tags to your post. (For more information on tags, refer to the sidebar “What are tags, and how/why do I use them?” earlier in this chapter.)
Featured Image: Some WordPress themes are configured to use an image (photo) to represent each post that you have on your site. The image can display on the home or front page, blog page, archives, or anywhere within the content display on your website. If you’re using a theme that has this option, you can easily define the post thumbnail by clicking the Set Featured Image link below the Featured Image module on the Add New Post page. Then you can assign an image that you’ve uploaded to your site as the featured image for a particular post.
When you finish setting the options for your post, don’t navigate away from this page; your options haven’t yet been fully saved. The next section, “Publishing your post,” covers all the options you need for saving your post settings.
Publishing your post
You’ve given your new post a title and written the content of your new post. Maybe you’ve even added an image or other type of media file to your blog post (see Chapter 6) and configured the tags, categories, and other options. Now the question is whether to publish — or not publish (yet).
WordPress gives you three options for saving or publishing your post when you’re done writing it. The Publish module is located on the right side of the Add New (or Edit) Post screen. Just click the title of the Publish module (see Figure 5-7) to display the settings you need.
Save Draft: Click this button to save your post as a draft. The Add New Post screen reloads with all your post contents and options saved. You can continue editing now, tomorrow, the next day, or next year; the post is saved as a draft until you decide to publish it or delete it. Visitors to your site can’t see posts saved as drafts. To access your draft posts, click the Posts link on the Posts menu.
Preview: Click the Preview button to view your post in a new window, as it would appear on your live site if you’d published it. Previewing the post doesn’t publish it to your site yet. Previewing simply gives you the opportunity to view the post on your site and check it for any formatting or content changes you want to make.
Status: Click the Edit link to open the settings for this option. A drop-down menu appears, from which you can choose one of these options:
Draft: The post is saved but not published to your site.
Pending Review: The post shows up in your list of drafts next to a Pending Review header. This option lets the administrator of the blog know that contributors have entered posts that are waiting for administrator review and approval (helpful for sites that have multiple authors). Generally, only contributors use the Pending Review option.
Click OK to save your settings.
Visibility: Click the Edit link to open the settings for this option:
Public: Select this option to make the post viewable by everyone who visits your site. Select the check box titled Stick This Post to the Front Page to have WordPress publish the post on your site and keep it at the top of all posts until you change this setting for the post.
This option is otherwise known as a sticky post. Typically, posts are displayed in chronological order on your site, with the most recent post displayed at the top. If you make a post sticky, it remains at the top no matter how many other posts you make after it. When you want to unstick the post, deselect the Stick This Post to the Front Page check box.
Password Protected: By assigning a password to a post, you can publish a post to your site that only you can see. You can also share the post password with a friend, who can see the content of the post after he or she enters the password. But why would anyone want to password-protect a post? Imagine that you just ate dinner at your mother-in-law’s house, and she made the worst pot roast you’ve ever eaten. You can write all about it! Protect it with a password, and give the password to your trusted friends so that they can read about it without offending your mother-in-law.
Private: Publish this post to your blog so that only you can see it; no one else will be able to see it, ever. You may want to protect personal and private posts that you write only to yourself (if you’re keeping a personal diary, for example).
Publish Immediately: Click the Edit link to make the publish-date options appear, and set the time stamp for your post. If you want the post to have the current time and date, ignore this setting.
If you want to future-publish this post, you can set the time and date for anytime in the future. If you have a vacation planned and don’t want your site to go without updates while you’re gone, for example, you can write a few posts and set the date for a time in the future. Those posts are published to your site while you’re somewhere tropical, diving with the fishes.
Publish: This button wastes no time! It bypasses all the draft, pending review, and sticky settings and publishes the post directly to your site immediately.
Move to Trash: Clicking this link sends the entire post to the Trash. Your post isn’t deleted permanently, which is a relief if you happen to click that link by accident; instead, it’s saved in the Trash, where you can retrieve it later, if you want to. You can find the items in Trash by clicking the All Posts link on the Posts menu in the Dashboard and then clicking the Trash link.
After you choose an option from the drop-down menu, click the Save button. The Add New Post screen saves your publishing-status option.
If you click Publish and for some reason don’t see the post on your site, you probably left the Status drop-down menu set to Draft. Your new post appears in the draft posts, which you can find on the Dashboard’s Posts page. Just click the Posts link on the navigation menu.
Editing your post
While I write this book, I have editors and proofreaders looking over my shoulder, making recommendations, correcting my typos and grammatical errors, and helping me by telling me when I get too long-winded.
You, on the other hand, aren’t so lucky! You’re your own editor and have full control of what you write, when you write it, and how you write it. You can always go back and edit posts to correct typos, grammatical errors, and other mistakes by following these steps:
Find the post that you want to edit by clicking the All Posts link on the Posts menu.
The Posts screen opens, listing the 20 most recent posts you’ve made to your site.
To filter that listing of posts by date, choose a date from the All Dates drop-down menu at the top of the Posts screen (Dashboard ⇒ Posts). If you choose March 2017, the Posts page reloads, displaying only those posts that were published in March 2017.
You can also filter the post listing by category. Choose your desired category from the All Categories drop-down menu.
When you find the post you need, click its title.
Alternatively, click the Edit link that appears below the post title.
The Edit Post screen opens. In this screen, you can edit the post and/or any of its options.
If you need to edit only the post options, click the Quick Edit link. The post options open, and you can configure post options such as the title, status, password, categories, tags, comments, and time stamp. Click the Save button to save your changes without ever leaving the Post page of your Dashboard.
Edit your post; then click the Update button.
The Edit Post screen refreshes, with all your changes saved.
Look Who’s Talking on Your Site
The feature that really catapulted blogging into the limelight is the comments feature, which lets visitors interact with the authors of sites. Comments and trackbacks are great ways for readers to interact with site owners, and vice versa. I cover both comments and trackbacks in Chapter 2.
Managing comments and trackbacks
To find your comments, click the Comments link on the Dashboard navigation menu. The Comments page opens (see Figure 5-8).
FIGURE 5-8: Clicking the Comments menu shows you the Comments page, with all the comments and trackbacks on your site.
When you hover your mouse pointer over your comments, several links appear that give you the opportunity to manage those comments:
Unapprove: This link appears only if you have comment moderation turned on, and only for approved comments. The comment is placed in the moderation queue, which you get to by clicking the Awaiting Moderation link that appears below the Manage Comments header. The moderation queue is kind of a holding area for comments that haven’t yet been published to your blog. (See “Moderating comments and trackbacks” later in this chapter for more on the moderation queue.)
Reply: Click this link, and a text box drops down. In this text box, you can type and submit your reply to the person who commented. This feature eliminates the need to load your live site to reply to a comment.
Quick Edit: Click this link to open the comment options without leaving the Comments page. You can configure post options such as name, email, URL, and comment content. Click the Save button to save your changes.
Edit: Click this link to open the Edit Comment page, where you can edit fields such as name, email, URL, and comment content (see Figure 5-9).
Spam: Click this link to mark the comment as spam and toss it into the spam bin, where it will never be heard from again!
Trash: This link does exactly what it says: sends the comment to the Trash and deletes it from your blog.
FIGURE 5-9: Edit a user’s comment in the Edit Comment page.
If you have a lot of comments listed in the Comments page and want to bulk-manage them, select the boxes to the left of all the comments you want to manage. Then choose one of the following from the Actions drop-down in at the top-left corner: Approve, Mark As Spam, Unapprove, or Delete.
Moderating comments and trackbacks
If you have your options set so that comments aren’t published to your site until you approve them, you can approve comments from the Comments screen as well. Just click the Pending link on the Comments screen, and you go to the Edit Comments page. If you have comments and/or trackbacks awaiting moderation, you see them on this page, where you can approve them, mark them as spam, or delete them.
A nice feature of WordPress is that it immediately notifies you of any comments sitting in the moderation queue, awaiting your action. This notification appears as a small circle to the right of the Comments menu on the left navigation menu of every single page. Figure 5-10 shows my Dashboard page with an indicator in the Comments menu showing a comment awaiting moderation. (An indicator also appears on the top toolbar.)
FIGURE 5-10: These indicators tell me that I have a comment awaiting moderation.
Tackling spam with Akismet
I touch on Akismet a few times throughout this book because it’s my humble opinion that Akismet is the mother of all plugins and that no WordPress site is complete without a fully activated version of Akismet running on it.
Apparently, WordPress agrees, because the plugin has been packaged in every WordPress software release beginning with version 2.0. Akismet was created by the folks at Automattic.
I’ve been blogging since 2002 when I started blogging with the Movable Type blogging platform. I moved to WordPress in 2003. As blogging became more and more popular, comment and trackback spam became more and more of a nuisance. One morning in 2004, I found that 2,300 pieces of disgusting comment spam had been published to my blog. Something had to be done! The folks at Automattic did a fine thing with Akismet. Since the emergence of Akismet, I’ve barely had to think about comment or trackback spam except for the few times a month I check my Akismet spam queue.
I talk in greater detail about plugin use in WordPress in Chapter 7, where you find out how to activate Akismet and make sure that it’s protecting your blog from trackback and comment spam.
Setting up categories
Content on your website can become unwieldy and disorganized, requiring you to revisit these next few features sometime in the near future so that you can get the beast under control. Why not do a little planning and get the work over with now? I promise that it won’t take that long, and you’ll thank me for it later.
The default category also serves as a kind of fail-safe. If you publish a post to your site and don’t assign that post to a category, the post is automatically assigned to the default category, no matter what you name the category.
Deleting a category doesn’t delete the posts and links in that category. Instead, posts in the deleted category are assigned to the Uncategorized category (or whatever you named the default category).
If you have an established WordPress site with categories already created, you can convert some or all of your categories to tags. To do so, look for the Category to Tag Converter link in the bottom-right corner of the Categories screen of your WordPress Dashboard (refer to 
