WordPress Blogging for Beginners
We do all kinds of things with WordPress here at Hot Glue Media, but what it was built for, and what it’s still mostly used for, is blogging.
I’m not gonna teach you how to write a blog post here. You probably already know, and if you don’t, there are plenty of places where you can learn the basics (we’ve got one right here in fact). But WordPress has a lot of options, a lot of settings, and a bunch of things that just make blogging easier, and those are what I’m gonna talk about today.
So you’ve written a blog post, and you know that once you’re done, you click on ‘Publish’ to publish it. Yes?
But there’s a lot more in that ‘Publish’ box in the right sidebar.
The first tool you’ll find there is ‘Save Draft’. Use this when you’re ready to shut down your computer for the night, when it’s time to switch to another project for a while, or every five minutes while you’re writing. You’re familiar with the adage ‘Save early, save often’, I hope? Yeah. Do that.
The second is ‘Preview’. You want to see what your post will look like once it’s all grown up, right? This does that. Just click ‘Preview’…
…and it’ll open another tab that’ll contain a preview of your magnum opus.
Click it again once you’ve made changes, and it’ll show you what you’ve done.
Say your blog has several people writing for it, and you’re ready for the editor to look over the post you’ve just written. Or you think you’re done writing it, but just want to look over it in a day or two to make sure. You can change the ‘Status’ to ‘Pending Review’ to signify this. (This doesn’t actually make any substantive change in the status of the post itself, but it’s useful for separating draft posts from posts that are almost ready to be posted.)
Or say you’re the editor, and you want your writers to be able to write their posts directly within your WordPress platform, but you don’t want them to have permission to publish until you’ve had a look at what they’ve written. You can use the ‘User Role Editor’ (under Users in the sidebar) to decide who’s allowed to do what. I won’t go into too much detail with this now, but it’s awfully useful.
You can also make posts private — visible only to you — or make them password protected, so only certain people can see them. Or if your theme allows, you can make a post ‘sticky’, so that it will always appear at the top of your blog (more about these here).
And here’s the best part — post scheduling. It took me years to figure this out and boy, has it made my life easier. Write an entire week’s worth of posts (or a month’s worth, if you’re ambitious) and schedule em out. Then wander off and goof around for a while, because WordPress will make them go for you. It’s all under ‘Publish’.
Not sure what you’ve got scheduled to post when? Click on ‘Blog’ and ‘Manage’…
…and it’ll display each post, complete with when it’s scheduled to go.
All done scheduling and private-ing and draft-ing? You’ll notice that ‘Publish’ changes depending on what you’ve done — it might become ‘Schedule’ or ‘Update’. But it’ll all do the same thing — save your post and make it ready to go.
admin made this mess on June 1st, 2011 and filed it under WordPress