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Digital Strategies Communications and Marketing

WP 101 – Ch 1 – The WordPress Dashboard and how to edit a page

Notes:

Logging in
click on the copyright symbol © at the bottom of the screen.
Enter your VUnetID and ePassword at the log in prompt

Dashboard
The Dashboard is the first page you will see after logging in. This area can have various widgets to show site activitiy like the number of Posts and Pages.

Posts and Pages – types of content
In the left sidebar you will see the different types of content. You will use Posts and Pages for most of your content.

Pages
When you click on Pages, you will see a list of Pages. Click on the title to edit an entry.

Page/Post fields
Title: Title of the page
Permalink: the part of the URL you can edit which is called the “slug”
Content area:
Visual tab – WYSIWYG area. Enter content here edit controls are similar to a word processing program.
Text tab – HTML view for content
Custom fields – where you enter custom code
Page attributes – Use on Pages. Controls page template selection and hierarchy
Tags – Primarily used with Posts. Adds meta information to a post which can later be used to filter data.
Preview – See page changes before they are live and publicly viewable by your audience. When you preview a page, notice the added text to the URL.
/about/test-3/?preview_id=719@preview_nonce=50d8…
If your URL has that, then your changes are not yet published and viewable.
Update – click this botton to publish your content
View your content – After you click Update, you should see a message saying “Page updated. View page”. Click on View page. Notice that the URL no longer has the &preview_id text and your URL is much shorter and cleaner looking.

Publish area
Status – possible states: ‘published’ = page/post is live, ‘pending review’ = content awaiting approval by an editor or admin before publishing, ‘draft’ = unpublished.
Visibility – ‘password protected’ = must enter password to view content, ‘private’ = only visible to authorized users with editor or admin privileges
Revisions – Shows a list of changes made to the page
Published – Schedule a post to publish.
Update – publishes the page.

Content area
Edit content much the same way you would a word processing program like Word.

Top row
image1-wp-dashboard-edit

  1. Bold
  2. Italics
  3. Strikethrough
  4. Bulleted list
  5. Numbered list
  6. Blockquote
  7. Horizontal line
  8. Text: align left
  9. Text: align center
  10. Text: align right
  11. Create hyperlink
  12. Remove hyperlink
  13. Add ‘read more’ section

.

  1. Add media button (insert pictures, documents, pdfs)
  2. Visual editor tab – This is the visual mode for editing content which makes it more like a word processing program.
  3. Text editor tab – Use this to edit the HTML for the post
  4. Full screen mode – allows for full screen mode editing

Bottom row

image2-wp-dashboard-edit

  1. Text styles. H1-H6 and preformatted
  2. Underline
  3. Text: justify
  4. Change text color
  5. Copy as plain text
  6. Remove formatting
  7. Insert special characters
  8. Indent text
  9. Remove indent
  10. Undo action
  11. Redo action
  12. Display help information in the editor