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.
[heading size=”17″]How To Enable Hidden Metaboxes?[/heading]
On every post edit screen there is tab with title ‘Screen Options’ on the top right corner. Clicking that tab shows various checkboxes you may use for enabling other hidden features.
For example: Suppose you want to enable Excerpts (a metabox used for posting small custom summaries of posts which shows up on multipost pages like home page, your blog post, tags & category archives pages and also on the search engine results.), click ‘Screen Options‘ tab, tick the option ‘Excerpts‘ and it will start showing the excerpts metabox on your post edit screen.
You can do same for enabling/disabling other metaboxes like Format, Categories, Tags, Featured Image, Send Trackbacks, Custom Fields, Discussion Slug, Author and other custom metaboxes added by plugins.
[heading size=”17″]How To Enable Single Column Layout?[/heading]
Another good feature of ‘Screen Options‘ tab is screen layout. The option allows you to switch from dual column to single column layout and get more writing space. To enable single column layout simply click ‘Number of Columns‘ radio button to 1, this shifts your right admin sidebar containing post publishing and other options to the bottom of your post editor.
[heading size=”17″]How To Rearrange Metaboxes & Widgets?[/heading]
You can rearrange metaboxes in your way. For example: Suppose you always give custom excerpts to your posts then you can drag ‘Excerpts’ matabox from the bottom of your post editor to right top section, near ‘Publish’ metabox so that you can quickly add manual excerpts with having to scroll down. In the same way you can drag-drop and rearrange each and every metabox of your post edit screen.