Hi, this is Chris Marciello from VitaminCM.com and today I'm going to show you how to enter a new article in to your Wordpress blog from the web interface.
You’ll notice here I don’t have any articles written which is why it says there is no articles found. So what I'm going to do is log in to get to the web interface. So I’ll click the login, enter my ID and password. And once I've log in, I’ll be at the dashboard. You can see a couple of pieces of information right here, so I have zero post yet. What I want to do is go over here to the post section. And you’ll see it says no post found. So I don’t have any written. If there were existing post, it will all be listed. I could edit them, I could delete them and do other things.
So I’ll click add new. And this will bring up the add new post interface. There are several here, so I had to add a title in the first field. This is the body of my post. An excerpt, that will get fold in to the RSS feed that people would be able to see. Track back, so if I want to track back. So it comes back to this page, to a specific page. I can send them to a specific page. There are custom fields that you can use in Wordpress. You can select category for your post. You can put tags on your post. And then there's a save and a preview button.
What I did to make this video go a little more smoothly is I typed up my whole article outside of Wordpress just in text editor. So I'm going to go over here my text editor and I'm going to grab the title and I'm just going to paste it in to the title field. Now what I also have is the body of my article. So I want to select that and copy it. And coming back over here to the body section.
Now, if you notice, there are two different tabs. There is a visual tab and an html tab. If you want to write raw html code from scratch, you can do that. There's a couple handy things here to help you along. Or if you want to use a visual editor more like Microsoft Word or something, you can do that.
I'm going to show you how to use that first. So what I’ll do is I’ll paste in content of my article. You’ll notice it’s all here. You can do different things to for instance highlight information. So I’ll highlight that and I can like bold. You could italicize things. If you notice down here where I talked about the topics that I'm going to cover on the next blog. It’s in a list, I want to make this a bulleted list. So I’ll just select it all and hit the bulleted list icon and that makes it bullets so it does all the html coding for you. I'm going to get that extra space out of there. If I want to put a link in, highlight it and do that using this link tool and insert it. That inserts the hyper link into your article. That was my email address. If it was a link to a website, I can just paste in the URL from the website, do that.
Let me show you the html editor. So if I go in here, I want to take this first sentence. I want this to be the subtitle of my article so I'm just going to make it a heading to. You can notice it put the proper html code in for that bulleted list that I created. They put the proper html code in for that email link that I created. But everything looks pretty good.
Now, one of the other things I want to do is add some images in to this article. Now if you look here on my hard drive, I have the two images that I want to use. One is a picture of me and one’s map of the town, just the name of the website on it. So what I'm going to do is click this add image button, and it keeps a library of your files. So I haven’t uploaded any files yet, so what I want to do is upload one. So I’ll do browser upload and I’ll browse through the folder where I have the images. So upload one. Then I’ll browse for the other one. Upload that. And you notice I click on either of these and I can give them title. You can give it a caption, a description. Save that. So now I have a gallery of images. What I can do is I can insert them one at a time or the whole thing at once.
Now I want to go to the media library. Once I go to the media library, you’ll see the images that I have. So I want to highlight this one. And down here there's a button that says insert into post. So I’ll do that. And if I go back to the visual editor, you’ll see where I inserted it. You could drag it around just like you would drag it around on a PowerPoint slide or Word document. And I also want to insert another image here. So I’ll go back to add an image over the gallery. Click on the other image. And I’ll just say insert in to post. And that will be inserted into the post also.
So once I have all that ready. What I want to do is, I want to set it to the html viewer. And I want to select all the text in my post. So not all the text, but all the html content. Then I want to come down here to the excerpt and paste it in. now remember, if anybody subscribes to the RSS feeds. What they’re going to view is all the information in your excerpt field. So this is what I want somebody to see that subscribes to the RSS feed.
Now the next thing I want to do is add some categories. So I'm just going to set it under miscellaneous. Because it doesn’t cover any one topic particularly. It really is just miscellaneous article about what's going on on the site.
When I go back, I want to go back to this notepad file and I want to put some tags on this article. Tags are little keywords that help identify the article and its content. So I'm going to go to this add new tag field, and I could put one at a time and keep hitting add or I could put in a string in them separated by a comma. And if you notice in my text file, that’s what I have. So I'm just going to paste in all those tags and hit add. And you’ll notice it breaks each one of those comma separated tags out.
Couple of things that you want to do. You can hit publish if you want to immediately publish this and make it live. But what I want to do is save it as a draft, so I’ll click the save draft button. And I want to preview it to see what it’s going to look like before I publish it. So I’ll hit the preview button, but I want to say open link and a new tab. And this is going to open it up in a new tab so I could see the preview and see what it’s going to look like.
So there is the article that I've put together. It’s pretty basic, what I’ll do is I’ll go back to my other tab where I have my edit post window open. And I'm just going to hit publish, and this will publish it.
There are several other options here. If you notice it says there's a little calendar. If I wanted to say publish it tomorrow morning at 9 in the morning, I could schedule that out from the calendar. But I want to publish it right now. So if I click visit site, this is going to open up the actual site. So now when I go to the home page, and I’ll click it, I don’t get that message anymore telling me there's no content. What I get is my one article on here. And you can scroll down and read the entire article.
Now, you’re back to this article. Instead of having every bit of this article visible on the homepage. What I want to do is I want to put a break in right here. So only from here up is visible and the rest of this will only be visible if you go to read the entire article. So to do that, you use the more tag. This is a little feature built in to Wordpress that will do that. And if you notice its right here, so you put your cursor where you want to split the article and hit more and it puts that more tag in there. And I will update the post, see it spins here. And when it’s done, I’ll go back to the homepage. Click it and you’ll notice it shot off the article just where I want it. Now if I want to read the rest of that, I’ll click read the rest of this entry. And up here, it goes to the page where the article is.
So that’s how you work with the Wordpress web interface to write and edit articles. There's a lot of tools like Windows Live Writer and several other tools where you can write in a desktop software. Kind of like the difference between using Gmail versus using Microsoft Outlook to handle your email. There's lots of pros and cons to doing that. I actually prefer to do it that way, use an off line desktop editor. But I want to show everyone the basics because this is what everyone will have access to. Okay, so during the next article, we’ll talk about using themes and widgets to customize the look and feel.
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