Create, Edit and Manage Posts

One of the first things you probably want to do on your new blog is to blog. WordPress calls each blog article you create for your content a post. Click on the Posts link in the list on the left side of your dashboard and you should see something like the following. Of course, if you haven't written any posts yet, your list will either be empty of have the default “Hello World” post.

Notice that in the list on the left, new items are now listed under Posts. Your list may be shorter than this, or different. Some of these items are dependent on optional plugins that have been installed. In this example the list includes: Add New, Post Tags, Categories, Manage Tags, Mass Edit Tags and Auto Tags.

Above the list of Posts (beneath the Edit Posts title) is a drop down box to perform bulk actions on all checked posts (edit/delete). Next to this are filters for dates and categories. If you have a lot of posts, this can be very useful. The last two icon buttons (on the right) allow you to switch between the list view shown in the image and an excerpt view where the beginning text of each post is displayed (helpful if you aren't sure which post you wanted to edit).

You can edit a post by clicking on its title. If you allow your mouse to hover over the title area you can see quick menu to allow other editing options.

These are Edit, Quick Edit, Delete and View.

When you click on the Add New Link (left panel) a blank edit window opens (see next image). The edit box directly beneath the “Add New Post” heading is where you type in the title for your post. WordPress will turn spaces into underscores for the URL that will be created (the permalink).

The large text area under the tool bar is where you enter your content. I'm going to cover that and other areas for posts under the Edit Window section below.

The next image is pretty much the same as the previous, only this time it is showing content. I think this will make it easier to understand what happens when creating or editing text. The edit window is the same either way. The difference is whether you start with an existing post you plan to edit or a blank window to create a new post

The post title (first text box) for this example is “Hosting Options - Introduction”. Notice that WordPress displays the resulting permalink beneath this title. In this example (ignoring the domain - this example is hosted on a local development server) the permalink created from the title is /2009/hosting-options-introduction/. Spaces have been removed and where necessary replaced with ”-”.

You can customize the permalink by clicking on the Edit button the follows the permalink.

The next line after the permalink section is labeled Upload/Insert. It is followed by icons for the type of content you want to upload or insert. These buttons may be different in your WordPress editor depending on the multimedia plugins you have installed, if any.

The Edit window defaults to a WYSIWYG editor view. If you need to edit something in HTML you switch between the Visual view and an HTML view using the tabs on the right (Visual and HTML).

The WYSIWYG button bar applies formatting just as you would expect it to. The most common functions are on the first row. Hover your mouse over the button to the name in a tooltip. The second row of buttons may not be visible when you first see the edit window. There is a button that will toggle the display of the second row. Click on the last button (far right) in the first row (the “Kitchen Sink” button) to toggle the second row on or off.

If you like to create your blog post drafts in Microsoft Word (many people do) be aware that this could lead to some formatting issues in your posts. To avoid these formatting issues, do not paste directly into the WYSIWYG editor window. Instead click the Paste from Word button on the second row (Word-like document icon). Then paste into the window and click on insert. This keeps your content and compatible formatting while stripping out the problem code.

If you forget and paste Word, or simply get unexpected looking content due to formatting there is another option. The button next to the Paste from Word button (looks like an eraser) will remove formatting from selected text.