This article is about How to use WordPress Posts
This aFrequently, when people start to use WordPress, they get confused between Posts and Pages. The default setup of WordPress has both Posts and Pages enabled. When you first take a look at them, they appear to be very similar, and you may be asking yourself, why does WordPress have both? In this article, we will be taking a look at Posts and explain their function.
What are Posts?
Posts are the blog content you publish, listed in reverse order, so the newest content is displayed first. If you are writing a blog, typically, you will write far more posts than Pages. Posts may have comments underneath them. Think of posts as being “Articles” on particular topics. Pages exist to serve as informational items, such as “About Us”, “Price Lists”, and “Contact Pages.” They are not time-sensitive like Posts and retain a fixed position within the website.
Having defined what Posts are, we will now take a look at them in more depth.
Posts Listings
Open the “Dashboard”, and on the left-hand side, you will see a menu. Click on “Posts.“By default, when you open the posts section, you will see one post that has been premade during the setup. This post is called “Hello World.” This is purely a sample post that we can delete when we want.
But first, we can explore this page. Along the top, you will see some buttons, the first of which says “Bulk Actions“, and you click on the down arrow next to it and choose “Move to Trash” and then press the “Apply” button, it will delete all of the posts that have been selected by checking the box next to them. This is an excellent way of deleting multiple posts.
Moving along to the button that says “All Dates” and pressing the down arrow next to it. It will display all the months since you started the blog, and you can filter those months individually. This is useful; when you have a long-established site with lots of posts.
The next button says “All Categories.” And the page is now displaying all the blog posts. Click on the arrow adjacent to this, and a drop-down appears. This drop-down displays all the categories you have set up. At the moment, it will only show “Uncategorized.” Set the month and the categories and then press the “Filter” button, and it will filter the display to match the selection.
On the right, there is a search box. If you know the name or part of the name of the blog post you are searching for, enter it here and then hit the “Search Posts” button.
Going down the page to the “Hello World” post, you will notice that if you hover your mouse over the name of the post, a small menu will appear under the title. This menu contains four options which are all quite self-explanatory. Depending on the plugins and themes you have installed, this menu might include other options.
If you click on one of these menu options called “Trash”, it will delete the post. The post will disappear, but above the buttons we looked at earlier, you will see the word “Trash” with Number 1 in brackets. If we click on that word, a new window opens listing all the posts that we have previously deleted. If we want to restore that post because we deleted it in error, we can hover over the title, and a small menu appears with two options (Restore or Delete Forever).
Looking at the list of posts, the title’s right is a column labelled “Author“. In that column, it will display the name of the person who posted the Blog Post. The next column shows the categories of the post. The third column displays any tags that were included. The fourth column may indicate that there is a comment against that post. If one is shown, click on it, and The post will be displayed, together with options that appear when you hover your mouse over the comment. These options include “Unapproved”, “Reply“, “Quick Edit“, “Edit“,” Spam“, and “Trash.” Comments are a way to allow readers to contribute to the debate, but unfortunately, they are often used by spammers to plug their websites, adding nothing to a debate.
We will now go back to posts again, so select the word “Posts” and bring up the list of posts. Click on the title of our post, “Hello World”, and open the post for editing.
Editing A Post
For this tutorial, we are using the latest WordPress, which is 2021. It may look different from your version of WordPress. First of all, we can look at the top bar.
- On the left, you will see a large “plus” sign. Click on that, and a window appears on the left, which lists all the available blocks. Blocks are a method of adding things to your WordPress post or page.
- This is how your blog post will be created. Later on, we may look at something called “Elementor”, which gives more control, but we will stick to basics for this tutorial. The blocks are on a layering system, so they can be moved up and down to change the order of the elements.
- Next to the “plus” sign is a “pen icon“. Clicking on this allows you to switch between the “Edit” and “Select” modes. To go back to the main heading, click it again.
- The third item on the toolbar is an “undo” button. Click on that, and it will undo the last action. If you undo something and then change your mind, you can change it back by clicking on the next icon.
- The fifth tool on the toolbar is the little “I” in a circle. This “Information” button will give you statistics about the page/post when you click on it.
- The “Three bars” open a list of the blocks on the page. Click on an item in the list, and you are taken there to edit it.
- “Save Draft” will save a working copy of the page/post but does not publish it.
- Preview will give you the option of seeing what your post looks like on a Computer, Tablet, or Mobile Phone. Clicking Preview in New Tab opens a new tab displaying the page/post.
- The “Publish” selection on the toolbar will give you some options. You can set the “visibility” of the page, When the Post should be published, and the option to add “Tags.”
- Click on the “Settings” icon on the far right-hand side of the toolbar, and there is a small window that opens. This window gives us general information about the page, including the Status of the page, the permalink, and the slug for the page, and a link showing the address (URL) of the post. Underneath that, there are sections marked “Categories“, “Tags“, “Featured Image“, “Excerpt, and “Discussion.” This is where you can add Categories and Tags to your post.
To return to the main dashboard, click on the big “W” on the top left corner.
Back to the Dashboard
On the left menu bar of the dashboard, we see the “Posts section.” Click on “All Posts“, and we see a list of all the posts that have been created, whether they are drafts or published. Next, we have “Add New“, which will open the page to add a new post. The following two items are Categories and Tags. These are ways of indexing the posts.
Categories
Click on “Categories“, and on the right, we see a list of all categories that have been created so far, and on the left, the option to create a new category. There is also the option to make a new category into a child category of a previously set category. Categories work with “Posts“, not “Pages“.
Tags
Tags are set up the same way as Categories and work the same way very much.
How to Use WordPress Posts to round up
When you have published a post, look to the bottom of the post, and you will see both the category and any tag that you have added to the post. Click on the category name, and WordPress will display a list of all posts that belong to that category. Similarly, with tags, click on the tag, and you will be shown a list of all posts that are also tagged the same way.
I hope that you have found this tutorial useful.
