WordPress Basics

Edit your Post or Page

Lets look at the tools you have on the Post / Page editor page:

First of all look at the top bar. There is a link ‘View Page’, it will take you to the front view again.

Next look to the right – the most important thing there is the blue ‘Update’ button. It is blue in our picture, but it can be other colour depending on your colour scheme. Remember – your changes are not saved untill you pressed this button!

If you edit with Block Editor or in some clever themes a lot of stuff is done via JavaScript, so some things may be saved at the same time as you are putting them in, and there can be other saving buttons on this page, but to be very safe don’t forget to press the Update button before leaving the page!

In fact WordPress will warn you if you forget to save your changes with this message: “This page is asking you to confirm that you want to leave – data you have entered may not be saved”. It tries to help you.

WYSIWYG box

First of all look at the tools at the top of the box – there are some basic tools there. From the left to right:

Paragraph drop list – type / select some text, press on the paragraph drop list and change your selected paragraph into a heading 1, 2,3 … 6. I normally use headings 2 and 3. Heading 1 should be reserved for the Page Title – Google doesn’t like you more than one Heading 1 on the page.

Bold or Italic styles, bullet points, text align left, centre, right, add link work like in most text editors. You can either select some text and apply the style or click on the style and start typing.

Read More tag may work in some themes, but don’t worry about it right now.

Toolbar Toggle shows you some more tools – feel free to explore. If you are not happy with the results you can use the ‘Clear Formatting‘ tool.

Visual / Text tabs

There are two tabs over the top right corner of the WYSIWYG textbox.

Visual tab is to be used when you are typing your text and formatting it. It is the WYSIWYG one.

Text tab will show you the html tags. Don’t go there unless you are prepared to work with HTML.

One exception: when you are pasting some text into your post in “Visual’ tab the WYSIWYG box may try to use that formatting and you may not like the result. You can try to use the Clear Formatting tool, or paste you text straight into the ‘Text’ tab, then go to the Visual tab and format the text yourself.

Another way to get rid of unwanted formatting is to paste your text into the Notepad (on Windows). Notepad doesn’t understand formatting deletes all of it, only keeps the line breaks.

Add media

You find this button above the WYSIWYG text box on the left.

Find a place in your text where you want to put your picture, click there, then click the Add Media button.

That will open the Media Library in a fly-out. Choose the picture you want to add, click on it and click the ‘add to post’ button in the bottom right corner of the window. Your picture will be inserted.

If the image you want to use is not in the library, click the Add Media button, then click on the Upload Files tab in the top left. You can drag the image into the upload field near the ‘Drop Files to upload’ text. You can also browse for your file the old way. Remember that there is a limit to the file size., you will see the warning text on the upload field.

Once your file is uploaded, click on it and click the ‘add to post’ button in the bottom right corner of the window. Your picture will be inserted.

Once the image is inserted, you can format it. Click on the image – you will see some tools there – image align, image size, link to, title, caption and some more.

Once you finished editing don’t forget to press ‘Update’ button.

 

 

Once you logged in, you can see the WordPress backstage. It looks like this:

Dashboard

On the left you can see the left menu, it has links to all websites bits you can edit and all the tools you can use. In the image above you can see Posts, Media, Comments, Profile, Tools, Collapse menu links. If you are a user with Editor level, you will also see ‘Pages’ link in the main menu.

Links in the left menu

• Posts – will open a list of exisitng posts, post categories and an ‘Add New’ link.
• Media – link to the Media library.
• Pages – will open a list of exisitng pages and an ‘Add New’ link.
• Comments – a list of all comments added to posts and pages if the site allows comments.
• Profile – your profile. You can change your email address, nickname, name, password, even the colour scheme  of your admin pages. The only thing you can’t edit is your username.
• Tools
• Collapse menu – will make your editing field wider.

Click on ‘Pages’ or ‘Posts’ – you will see all the posts or pages the site has. If you are an Editor, you will be able to edit any page or post or add more.

You can also delete posts and pages, but please be careful!

Pages Table

This is the list of pages / posts you will see when clicking on the Pages / Posts link in the left menu:

This looks very different from the front end of your website and can be confusing. I suggest you use a little trick: look at the top bar – at the very top of the page – you can see a home icon and your website name next to it. In the image above it is Smart Marketing.

Roll your mouse over the icon, a drop-down will appear with these words: Visit Site. You can click on it or right-click on it and open it in a new tab. Now you see the front end again, but at the very top you see the admin bar with some usefull links.

Browse your site the normal way, go to the page or post you want to edit. Then look at the top black bar. You will see the magic words there among other links: ‘Edit Post’ or ‘Edit Page’. Click on it and you will be taken to the Page / Post editor.

See how to use the WordPress Page or Post editor

 

So, you have a wesite, it is in WordPress and the site administrator has sent you your user name and password.

You log in.

What will you see?

You will be taken to the WordPress ‘backstage’. It looks like this:

Scary? Yes, there is too much at once, very confusing!

Don’t worry you will only see something like this if you are the site administrator. As an administrator you will have access to all tools.

If you are a site author, you will see a much simpler picture:

This is a good level to start with, not very confusing and you can’t destroy much on the site, only your own posts and pictures.

And if you think that being an author is too restrictive – look at the subscriber level, they can only manage their profile. And add comments to posts if the site allows this kind of behaviour.

Some User Levels in WordPress:

• Administrator (slug: ‘administrator’) – somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site.
• Editor (slug: ‘editor’) – somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users, add and edit site pages.
• Author (slug: ‘author’) – somebody who can publish and manage their own posts, can use all the media in the media library and upload their own pictures.
• Contributor (slug: ‘contributor’) – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.
• Subscriber (slug: ‘subscriber’) – somebody who can only manage their profile.

There can be more levels depending on the theme and plugins the site is using. Also a clever admin can change user permissions on their site and complicate things a bit more. Should we worry about it here?

Perhaps not. Enjoy your editing!

This is very confusing. You came to your website and you want to correct a few lines on the About Us page, or write a new article about your company. Where do you start? How do you get to the back side of your website, the backstage?

Most likely there will be no link, so here is what you should do:

1. Suppose your website url is
   mywebsite.com.au
2. Type this in your browser url window:
   mywebsite.com.au/wp-admin
   This will take you to the user login page. It looks like this:
   
3. Now type in your user name and password. You can use your email address instead of your user name (most of us do not remember what their user name is!)
4. If you do not remember your password, click on the link under the login form, that says ‘Lost your password?’ This is how it looks:
   
5.  Then go to your mailbox, wait for the recovery email to arrive and follow the instructions in the email to reset your password – don’t forget to write it down, so you know what it is!!!
6.  Go back to login page (point 1) and Log in.

Find about the WordPress User Levels

What you see when you log in – WordPress Backstage First View