Posts are the content entries used for showing articles and news content on your website. They are generally displayed in reverse chronological order on your home page or blog page. In contrast to pages, posts are un-hierarchical content types included in your website’s RSS feed.

As soon you install WordPress, you will notice a post with the title ‘Hello World!’. It is a sample WordPress post that you can edit or delete from the Dashboard -> Posts -> All Posts page. In the same way you can write new posts from Posts -> Add New page. In this lesson, you will learn how to create your first post in WordPress.

Step-1 Login To Your WordPress Site

First, log in to your website by visiting yourdomain.com/wp-admin page in your web-browser.

Step-2 Visit ‘Add New’ Post Screen

As soon you log in to the WordPress admin area, you see the dashboard’s home screen (Dashboard -> Home). Now navigate to Posts -> Add New screen as shown on the given screenshot:

Step-3 Start Writing

Add a title and start writing your content. Use the ‘+’ button to insert custom blocks for adding images inside your posts. For instance, To insert any image from your computer:

1. Click the ‘+‘ button
2. Click the ‘Image‘ icon
3. Click ‘Upload Files‘ to upload the image and click insert image.
4. You can also add a custom link to the image, set its alignment, or choose a custom size.

The image is inserted on the location of your cursor.

On the right hand side you will be noticing a ‘Categories‘ metabox, from there you can select a category for your post. If this is your first blog post, you will need to create a new category, simply click ‘Add New Category‘ link, give a name to your category and add it.

Similarly ‘Tags‘ metabox enables you to add keywords related to your post. Tags and Categories are for grouping similar posts together. The main difference between tags and categories is categories are hierarchical taxonomies where you can create child or subcategories whereas tags are given by simply typing keywords and your post gets un-hierarchical grouped in the given tag.

Post Excerpts is another metabox present at the bottom of post content box. Post excerpts are the small summaries of posts showing up on the multipost pages like home page, the blog post, tags & category archives pages, and on the search engine result pages. Adding an excerpt is an optional thing to do, if you don’t give post excerpts then it will be automatically taken from the beginning lines of your post.

Step-4 Publish Your Post

Finally, when you are done writing your post click the ‘Publish‘ button and your post will go visible to your website visitors. You may also use the ‘Save Draft‘ button to save your post as a draft in Posts -> All Posts -> Drafts (Link) for completing and publishing it in the future.

Some other options of the right admin sidebar include Status which shows whether your post is a draft, under review or published, Visibility option lets you control post visibility i.e. you can make your post public (default) or private (only for logged in users) or password protected (you can lock it with a custom password) and the ‘Move to Trash‘ option that deletes your blog post.

Earlier we have discussed about writing your first blog post. In this tutorial we will explain you how to enable hidden features of WordPress post edit screen and customize it. Post edit screen is an admin page from where you write new blog posts (Dashboard -> Posts -> Add New) or edit old ones. Default post edit screen consists of post editor and meta boxes like publish, format, tags, categories and featured image.

Continue reading How To Customize WordPress Post Edit Screen? →