If you haven’t seen the video “What is WordPress Anyway?”, I suggest you watch that video first to get you oriented on what WordPress is and how it works.
Let’s post an article to our blog.
We begin with the front page of 1happysite.com, a website I built to demonstrate a WordPress website with a custom theme, allowing my clients to start thinking about how they want their website to work.
Let’s go to the blog summary page. This page has an entry for each post, with the most recent shown at the top. Each blog has a
- Title
- Featured Image
- Text
Let’s look at one of the blogs. This is a post about Web Pages, an article I wrote for people to better understand how web pages work.
You can see it has a title, a featured image at the top, then followed by the text of the article.
We are going to add a new post announcing this video. I am going to login to WordPress to add the new post.
When we hover over the posts menu, you can see there are a variety of choices, the easiest one to select is “All Posts”. This moves to the summary page where you can see all the posts, and a good page to work from.
Along the top, you see the Add New button. Click that, and we have an empty post. This is the new Gutenberg editor, so it looks a bit blank. The Gutenberg editor uses blocks that are of different types and we will get to that in a minute. But let’s start with the title at the top.
Let’s write the title. “Coming Soon! WordPress Tutorial”
Notice when I hit return at the end of my title, the editor jumps down to a new empty block. This is where you can start typing the article. I am going to cut and paste the first paragraph in.
Coming soon to YouTube! I am currently creating a video that steps through building a post on a blog, just like this one. I have a similar video, “Envira Gallery Demonstration” that steps through updating a portfolio.
In the Gutenberg editor, there are different block types. This is a paragraph block. You can see a toolbar emerges along the top of the block to allow you to make changes to the styling of the text you are writing. I can make the first part of the paragraph bold, by selecting the text and hitting the B. You can see it is now bold.
This paragraph talks about another video I created, so let’s link to that video post. I will select Envira Gallery Demonstration and click the link button. This brings up a dialog to create the link, I start to type the post title and it finds the post automatically. I just need to select it and the link is created.
The tool bar also has a button with three dots that helps you manage your blocks. I am going to select “Insert After” to create another paragraph by cutting and pasting the next paragraph.
I am using this post to show how to create a post from scratch. This will help my clients where I have built a WordPress website for them, and this video will help them get started generating content for their blog.
One note, if I had pasted two paragraphs, two blocks would have been created automatically, instead I took it one step at a time, so we can watch it work.
If I move my cursor to the end of the paragraph (as if I had typed it in), I can hit the return key and another paragraph block will be automatically created.
I will type in the next paragraph and start an unordered list
When I hit return I type the first list item. I then click on the paragraph symbol and change this block to a list type. When I hit return, it creates another list item and I can continue creating my list.
The video will show:
- Creating a new post
- Working with the new Gutenberg article
- Uploading the Featured Image
- Publishing out to the public website
Now let’s turn our attention to the Featured Image. Along the right are various properties to set for the article. Notice there are two tabs along the top, Document and block. The Document set of properties is for the article as a whole. We want to set the Featured Image.
Down here I can click Set Featured Image, which brings me to the Media Library. I can upload the image I need. Once it is uploaded, I can press the Set Featured Image button along the bottom. Now, this featured image will be automatically shown along the top of the article, as well as the summary page.
The article is ready and if I wasn’t quite ready to publish, I could click Save Draft. This will create the post, but not show it on the public website. I am ready for it to be shown on the website, so I hit Publish and WordPress will ask one more time to ensure I am good to go.
Now, let’s look at the post on the website. We’ll start by looking at the blog summary page. You can see the article is at the top, because it is the most recent article. You can also see the featured image, and the beginning of the article.
If we click Read More, we will see the full article. You can see our title, featured image and text. The first part of the text is bold and I can click the link to move to the other post.
Notice in the footer of the website, there is a list of Recent Posts. The new article is automatically listed there and we can click that link to get back to it.
So now you have seen the basics of creating your first post. There is a lot more to know about the Gutenberg editor, but this will get you started and the editor is designed to help you learn as you go.
As part of your hosting I am always here to help and you can save your post as a draft and ask for my assistance before publishing if you aren’t sure how to format something. Also remember there are always backups of your website, so no worries!
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